When Mohammad Issa wants to visit his farm in the West Bank village of Ainin - 15 km (9.4 miles) from Jenin - he wakes up at 5 am, drives along a dirt track to Israel's separation wall and queues at the gate before handing over his identity card to an Israeli soldier.

Once the gate is opened, and he signs in, he crosses over to the Israeli side of the heavily militarised fence and has until 5 pm to cross back, or risk being locked out of the West Bank for the night.

He can only cross once a day - if it rains, if he is injured, or if he just forgets something, he is stuck on the Israeli side of the fence until 5 pm, no exceptions. Sometimes the soldiers don't even show up. Other times they simply announce the gate won't be opening that morning, and everyone has to go home.

"The wall took about 40 percent of this village's land," his cousin Arafat reveals as we're standing by the gate waiting to cross. "Most of it is planted with olives. It's as though you're raising a son, and he suddenly dies..."

Olive farming is today a political act in the occupied West Bank. The olive tree - extremely resilient and often the only thing that can grow in the driest areas of the West Bank and Gaza - has become a metaphor for the Palestinians' own lives.

Olives are also of huge economic importance, with the industry making up 15 percent of Palestine's GDP and supporting several hundred thousand Palestinians directly or indirectly. So when the Fairtrade Foundation announced that the world's first Fairtrade olive oil would come from Palestine, it was more than just PR. For many farmers, the benefits of the Fairtrade label and the principles of Fairtrade business have saved their livelihoods.

"Fairtrade is great," Arafat explains as his entire family - mothers and fathers, grandparents and little children - gather on his farm to harvest the remaining olives. "We've worked with (Fairtrade principles) in a co-op for four years, and honestly the price is better...Now we sell to Europe and the price of oil increased. We sell it for more than 20 Israeli Shekels ($4.80) up from 7 Shekels in 2004."

Arafat and his brother Mahmoud were lucky when the separation wall was built because their farm fell on the Palestinian side. While Mohammad relies on aid from UNRWA every six months just to feed his family, Mahmoud and Arafat are two of the farmers who will soon be begin selling Fairtrade olive oil to the UK.

Mahmoud squints into the sun as he looks over his farm, and speaks with obvious pride in knowing that he now receives a fair price for his oil, and that it will eventually end up in European and American shops bearing the rarely-seen label "Product of Palestine." And if things go as planned, these sales could benefit more than just the farmers.

When Gordon Brown announced Fairtrade olive oil at the Palestine Investment Conference in December of 2008, it was part of what he called his "economic roadmap for peace." The hope is that Fairtrade will not only boost the Palestinian economy through increased sales, but will offer much-needed development for Palestine's health, transportation and educational infrastructure.

Here's where Fairtrade's social premium comes in. A percentage of the overall price, on top of the farmer's profit, goes directly to the producer groups for them to decide what community projects to invest in.

Bakir Hamad sits smoking another cigarette in his living room in the village of Farkha, 20 km (12.5 milles) south of Nablus. He laughs at himself for wearing a button shirt and trousers for the Fairtrade Foundation's visit to his farm, "This is the first time I've ever looked this smart!"

Bakir, President of his local co-op, clearly outlines the benefits that Fairtrade principles have so far brought him - A stronger collective voice, group bargaining power, a better capacity to store his oil, good contacts with international groups and buyers and - most importantly - a better price. He says he'd like to see the social premium invested in either a mobile storage tank to increase capacity, or a tractor to increase productivity.

But the relatively small size of Bakir's village co-op belies the real scale of the olive oil industry: Fairtrade principles have turned a once local venture into big international business.

On a visit to the Palestinian Fair Trade Association (PFTA) - one of the largest unions in the West Bank - founder Nasser Abufarha proudly walks me through their new million dollar pressing and storing facility.

PFTA's commercial arm - Canaan Fair Trade - already exports nearly 500 metric tonnes of olive oil a year, and Nasser is aiming for 1000 tonnes by 2011. The new storage facility can hold a massive 500 tonnes, and the union is growing by three to four hundred farmers a year. Nasser believes this economy of scale can help overcome the obvious restrictions put in place by the occupation: roadblocks, checkpoints, security stops, arbitrary delays and alleged Israeli legislative restrictions on Palestinian international trade.

"We were born as a company to assist small producers to overcome these obstacles of the occupation," he says. "These restrictions could be overcome through co-op building and consolidating resources as well as concentrating products and working together with Fairtrade buyers who are also invested in overcoming these challenges with us and the farmers."

But with big business comes the temptation of big money. Later in the tour, far from the crowds of visitors, Nasser speaks bitterly about other exporters who - he claims - flooded the Palestinian market with cheap olive oil and caused the catastrophic price crash in 2004. Even the Ministry of Agriculture is often accused of corruption and neglect.

Then there are concerns about the entire Fairtrade structure. Layla A. Kaiksow was hired as a consultant by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation during the initial stages of pricing olive oil. In a 2007 report, she criticised what she called the "Palestinian NGO hegemony" involved in the process.

"It is painfully clear that Palestinian NGOs are blocking the full benefits of Fairtrade from reaching farmers and it should be a goal of all those involved to eventually remove this barrier and work in the future to deal directly with Palestinian producers," she explained by email from her home in Bethlehem.

But she was also quick to add that Fairtrade has the potential to overcome these issues if handled responsibly: "I hope that certification will give the industry some legality and minimize the abuse of Palestinian producers," she wrote.

Getting the balance right is more than just academic. "The ground is the only thing we have," Mahmoud Issa says, standing in the shade as he takes a break from harvesting. "The land is your honour. You can't part from your honour. We worked in Israel, then they built the wall and it was impossible to get in to work. Today there's no work except for olives and our land, and this land can't grow anything except olives."

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