When Roy Scott opened his first shop in Woodstock almost 30 years ago, his fellow traders were intrigued at his idea of selling goods bought directly from craftspeople in developing countries.

“One of them said ‘It is a lovely idea, but there’s no way this will work in Woodstock’. This was someone who had had a business here for 100 years. But they have gone and we are still here,” said Mr Scott.

Now Mr Scott, 66, is celebrating 30 years in business, having seen his idea take on a new lease of life with the current popularity of ‘fair trade’ ideas and the arrival of the Internet.

Before launching One Village, he had spent ten years at Oxfam’s headquarters in Summertown, Oxford, running its programme of selling ‘native handicrafts’ in charity shops.

“I took it over from a volunteer and I visited one of the importers. He explained that the goods were really cheap because ‘the natives will work for a bowl of rice’ and you could make huge profits for Oxfam’s work.

“When I reflected on it, it seemed like exploitation. Now we are used to talking about so-called ‘fair trade’ but in the 1960s, this didn’t go down very well.”

He decided to work only with co-operatives, cutting out all the middle-men, so that the money would go directly to the people producing the goods.

“I got in touch with social organisations and religious orders like the Dominicans, who were working with poor people. They were making good products, but they were being ripped-off by traders.”

In one area of the Philipines, a bamboo craft project grew from three or four people to employing enough people to support 700 families.

He left Oxfam after a disagreement over a new ‘commercial’ approach to business and worked as a consultant for a few years.

Then he discovered that the Philipines project had all-but collapsed.

“They said ‘please can you develop a market for us’, and I had the same thing from other groups. I chatted to some of my mates and decided to start One Village.

“I stuck to the ideals I had established at Oxfam. The original plan was that we would be a wholesaler, but the buyers wanted to look at our showroom. A little shop came on the market in Oxford Street, Woodstock, and we found we were quite good at selling things.”

For a while, he also had shops in King Edward Street, Oxford, and in Cheltenham, but then found a bigger shop in Woodstock and closed the others down.

His big recent success story has been the Internet, which has pushed turnover up to £500,000 a year, and allowed him to tell the story of each product and the lives of the people who produced it.

As well as running the Woodstock shop, the six-strong workforce sends out goods worldwide from a warehouse and office in Charlbury.

But ask him if he was one of the pioneers of fair trade and you get a strong reaction.

“I absolutely refuse to use this slogan. I think it is a gross exaggeration to say that anything is ‘fair’. To be fair, there has to be pretty close to an equal relationship between the producer and the buyer.

“But it is not like that. The difference between what life is like for the producers and what we would think of as the minimum standard of living for us is just obscene, and to say that it is ‘fair’ is just outrageous.

“It gets right up my nose that people say that anything is ‘fair trade’. It is a goal, yes, but let’s not make claims that things are fair. It is misleading to the public and it’s misleading to the producers to say that it is ‘fair’ when patently it is not.

“For us in One Village we are much more on the side of the producer than anyone else. We bend over backwards. We are probably fairer than anyone else, but we are not ‘fair’.”

He points out that you can’t produce a fair trade T-shirt for £5, since the fair trade process only covers raw materials.

“The only person to benefit from fair trade is the producer of the cotton — not the tailors or the weavers who make the products, which is where some of the worst conditions are.”

One Village is set up as a private business, with him as sole owner. At 66, does he have retirement plans?

“I’m in self-denial about this — it is a worry. We do remarkably well for the number of people we employ — most people think we are a much bigger organisation.

“The difference that it is making to the thousands of producers who depend on us for their livelihoods is enormous. We have worked with many of them for 20 years.”

He added: “We could probably do with an injection of other people’s ideas and imagination, but if we were to recruit someone else at my level at a commercial salary we couldn’t afford it. We hardly make any profits and wjhat we do make is re-invested.

“At the moment there is no choice and I’m hoping to go on doing it. But I won’t go on for ever.”