Rich country protectionism is indeed a barrier to poor country growth. But if you think changing the rules will make automatic winners of today's losers - the poor - then think again.

This is because trade is essentially about businesses competing to sell their wares. That's fine within developed markets, but pitching Southern producers against their Northern counterparts would be a gruesome mismatch.

The South will be knocked out regardless of trade rules being transparent and equal. The heavyweight champ knows all the right moves.

Northern enterprise is streetwise. Just how many rounds is your average sub-Saharan avocado exporter really going to last?

Protecting Southern markets from predatory Northern-based multinationals will hardly even up the bout. It's a bit like tying one hand behind the back of the heavyweight champ. Northern enterprise will still box clever.

Take China and India. Both have enjoyed unprecedented rates of growth - but only after steadily opening markets for trade.

The point being that reforming trade rules just about gets poor countries to the weigh-in room. Success or failure will be determined by how good enterprise is at producing, delivering, distributing, managing and innovating.

This is the missing half of trade justice. The capacity to trade domestically and internationally is just not there in numerous poor countries.

New trading opportunities alone do not lead to the self-sustaining economic growth that attacks poverty. We've all heard plenty about the dangers of mono-crop agriculture, collapsing commodity prices and the scourge of corruption.

But these things can be fixed in principle. What can't be fixed is what does not exist - genuine enterprise. Enterprise doesn't just pop up; it has to be nurtured en masse.

In Gujarat, the Shell Foundation is supporting 500 smallholder farmers in growing high quality organic cotton and then getting it to market in the North. This entails providing finance and support for producers, strengthening the supply chain and raising awareness among purchasers.

Today, the project is scaling up to help farmers from other states. There are also plans to align with eight other cotton-producing countries. This is going way beyond the confines of "Fair Trade" as we understand it, and suggests to us that reforming trade rules needn't result in a freakish mismatch.

But to help defeat poverty, business DNA must be transmitted along the development supply chain. When donors and big business finally forge partnership, we might just dodge the poverty trap.

It is not that Christian Aid objects to free trade on ideological grounds.

But poor countries and their producers, who struggle to make the best of dirt roads and near non-existent technology, are at the moment being thrust into a global market place where their products go head-to-head with those of hi-tech Western multinationals.

Taking liberties: poor people, free trade and trade justice , a new report from Christian Aid, argues for a more pragmatic approach, where poor countries are permitted to protect their vulnerable producers and fledgling industries - an approach that most of today's industrialised countries have used.

We are especially concerned about the fate of almost 900 million people in the developing world who still live by farming. As markets in poor countries have been prised open as a result of pressure from rich countries, products from those same rich countries have come flooding in.

Last year, UK Trade Minister Patricia Hewitt met Maria Marcos Rivera, a Honduran rice farmer who has now stopped producing because American rice flooded her country's markets in the 1990s.

As a result, Ms Hewitt and the government have argued that poor people should not have to pay the price for access to markets in rich countries.

Christian Aid agrees, which is why we are currently outraged at a set of new free trade agreements the European Commission is about to negotiate with its former colonies. These Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) will demand that in return for access to the European market they must open their markets to products from Europe. Consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers have warned of the devastation this may cause to industry in West Africa and the Caribbean in particular.

EPAs will not even be a case of giving with one hand and taking with the other. They will just be taking.

Poor countries should not be put under such pressure to implement free trade policies.

Things don't have to be this way: in India's dairy industry, and Mozambique's sugar sector, jobs and income have been created by using a nourishing blend of policies rather than a heavy dose of free trade.

If the world is to reach its target of halving poverty by the year 2015, a goal to which all governments, rich and poor, have pledged themselves to meeting, then trade must be made to work for poor people, rather than the other way around.

Free trade fundamentalism must be replaced by trade justice.