organic or fair trade?

went to the Organic Food Fair in town this weekend - not quite sure what to make of it all.

it is quite fashionable to be health-conscious these days - this seemed to be a large motivation for what was going on. why can't we be health-conscious simply because we care for ourselves, our children, other people and the environment?

i want to look into what makes something 'organic' and what makes something 'fairly traded' - for now i'm quite ignorant of the details. there were a lot more organic things than fair-trade things there, but that could be becuase the majority of the stalls were local/regional producers.

is it right to use consumer power to bring about change? the reason big supermarkets now provide organic alternatives is due to pester-power of consumers - the big corporates realised there was money to be made organic foods, etc. and have duly obliged us. no doubt they pass the cost on to us and the farmers who have to comply with all the regulations that govern the area. is this the most effective way of bringing change about, and does it give us the result we actually need? at the moment, most organic food is much more expensive than the chemically-soaked/GM alternative and isn't accessible to a large proportion of society.

given that fertilizers, pesticides, GM crops, industrial processes have largely been popularised by those with the aim of making as much money as possible for as little effort and that consumerism goes along hand-in-hand with that - is it possible to use a flawed system to change itself?