Live music, a short film, poetry, a public forum, quizzes, face painting, food and drinks, fair traded products from Africa, Latin America and Asia, and fresh organic fruit and veg from Malta took centre stage in this year's edition of the annual fair trade festival WorldFest, organised by Koperattiva Kummerc Gust and held on Sunday 24 June at the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta.

This 6th edition of WorldFest focused on Children at Work. Fair Trade helps low-income households earn a decent living, so they don't have to send their children to work. By improving resources and empowering people at both family and community level, it helps ensure better access for children to clean water and sanitation, education and health care. By buying Fair Trade, consumers can also be sure that children have not been exploited or trafficked.

In 2004, 246 million children aged between five and seventeen were child labourers, 73 million working children were less than 10 years old, 180 million worked in extremely dangerous conditions and 6.4 million children were trapped in slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities. The unfair terms of trade for raw materials, crippling import tariffs in industrial countries, heavily subsidised goods from industrial countries are all practices that exclude and marginalise millions of people in the rural South.

The main guest was National Commissioner for Children, Ms. Carmen Zammit, who also addressed the public forum on "Children at Work" together with Swedish Clean Clothes Campaign activist Nina Zita, students Beverly Tonna and Nicole Chetcuti from Carlo Diacono Girls Junior Lyceum in Zejtun, John Axiak from the Maltese fair trade cooperative and Julian Micallef, Civil Society Coordinator at Forum Malta fl-Ewropa. The discussion was chaired by sociologist Angele Deguara.