Fair Trade 101 with Coldplay It may be true that rock and roll and agricultural trade barriers don't mix. But even though Coldplay's Chris Martin doesn't sing about fair trade, that hasn't prevented him from becoming the cause's most visible front man. The 26-year-old Martin writes searing love songs and haunting ballads. His band has twice won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album, and, as the readers of Us Weekly know only too well, he dates Gwyneth Paltrow. But Martin has chosen not to live inside the bubble of success. Radicalized by a trip to Haiti he took with the relief agency Oxfam, he's taken up the cause of Third World farmers impoverished by World Trade Organization mandates that require developing nations to allow cheap, subsidized American and European crops to flood their markets, while their own exports remain thwarted by First World trade barriers. While touring during the past two years, Coldplay gathered more than 30,000 signatures for Oxfam's fair-trade petition. And last summer at the WTO summit in Cancun, Mexico, Martin delivered the petition—signed by nearly 4 million people—to the head of the organization. When he started down this activist path, Martin says, "I felt like a third-rate Bono.... Hopefully, it'll escalate until I feel like a full-on Bono."