Steve Bradshaw Panorama Reporter

Panorama: The dollar a day dress BBC One, Sunday, 6 March 2005, 22:15 GMT

Ever wondered why you've never tried Sahara camel cheese? Some years ago the President of the World Bank told me how tasty cheese from Mauritanian camels is. The problem, James Wolfensohn complained, is you can rarely find it outside Africa - arcane trade rules prevent its export.

Panorama investigated this scandal and found the rules in question were about preventing foot and mouth disease. Still the point was taken - you can eat great tasty food in Africa, Asia and Latin America that you can rarely buy in the West.

According to Mr Wolfensohn - "The Elvis of Economics" according to the rock star Bono - this is partly because the West places unnecessary restrictions on imports from poor countries - non-tariff barriers (like over-fussy hygiene restrictions), tariffs and import quotas.

And what's more it then clobbers farmers in the developing world by dumping its own unfairly subsidised produce on world markets. Western subsidies to its farm sector are estimated to be about six times as great as its overall aid budget to developing countries.

Two years ago, Panorama illustrated this debate by collecting foods from across the world, and challenging chef Antony Worrall-Thompson to cook them into a world class meal. Our film was pegged to Red Nose Day and made in the spirit of Comic Relief - Panorama sadly doesn't normally send reporters on round-the-world shopping trips for catfish, tomatoes, sugar, rice, coffee.

Steve gets to grips with some of the famous blue cotton in Mali

Since then the debate has moved on and few people will publicly defend trade-distorting farm subsidies anymore. This week the USA lost an appeal against a World Trade Organisation ruling that its cotton subsidies are in breach of its rules.

The USA has so far declined to commit to scrapping the subsidies but this has the whiff of a rearguard action - the libertarian American Right, like the Cato Institute for example, are firm supporters of free trade. There's little doubt that the world is moving - admittedly with elephantine speed and serpentine wiggles - towards a free trade system.

Now, there are many ways in which poor countries may benefit from free trade - Haitian peasants for example would no longer face competition from subsidised Mississippi rice farms. But there are also many snags - some would even argue irremediable flaws - in the free trade model.

So we decided to update our coverage of the debate using a similar formula as before. Working with student designers from the London College of Fashion - we've constructed the world's most unfairly traded dress. Every item we collected is produced by hard-working people living on just a dollar or two a day - like some two billion people, a third of the world's population.

We started our round-the-world trip in Mali updating the issue of farm subsidies that we covered before. Then we moved on to to look at some of the problems with the free trade model - dumping (Uganda), the lack of a level playing field (Peru), and finally the famous so-called "race to the bottom" (Cambodia).

All the fabrics we collected - illustrating different aspects of the trade debate - are in the final dress modelled by Tamzin Outhwaite during London Fashion Week. Our thanks to her, MC Jamie Theakston, and the eight students who bravely rose to our challenge