Fair Trade guarantees a minimum of $1.26/pound (a living wage) and access to credit at fair prices to poor farmers organized in cooperatives. These fair payments are invested in food, shelter, health care, education,
environmental stewardship, and economic independence. Fair Trade promotes socially and environmentally sustainable techniques and long term relationships between producers, traders and consumers.

http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/Mex...

Fair Trade works to correct these imbalances by guaranteeing a minimum wage for small producers' harvests and by encouraging organic and sustainable cultivation methods. Fair trade farmers are provided badly needed credit and assured a minimum of $1.26 per pound. In comparison, the world price usually hovers around $1 per pound, but most farmers earn less than 50 cents per pound since they are forced to sell to exploitative middlemen. With the profits generated from receiving fair wages, coffee growers can invest in health, education, and environmental protection.
http://www.fairtradefederation.org/memcof.html

Fair Trade standards stipulate that traders have to:
• pay a price to producers that covers the costs of sustainable production and living;
• pay a premium that producers can invest in development;
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ofgu/fair-trade-organic.htm

Organic farming is as viable as conventional - April 2003 A ten-year study by scientists at the University of Michigan reveals that corn and soybeans yields were only minimally reduced when organic production practices were used instead of conventional production practices. But the net results, taking the lower production costs of the organic systems into account, were that the two systems were more or less equal. When the organic premium price is factored in, the organic method was obviously much more profitable. These long-term experiments carried out in the heartlands of conventional maize and soyabean production.

http://www.planorganic.com/organic attack.htm