Kay Parris meets up with Harriet Lamb CBE, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation

What began in 1994 with the launch of a single ethically-produced and sold chocolate bar, has mushroomed into 7,000 products carrying the Fairtrade Mark today.

Two of the nation’s favourite chocolate bars – KitKat (four finger) and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk are Fairtrade. So are 30 per cent of our bananas and half the sugar we buy. Major supermarkets – the Co-op, M&S, Morrisons, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s – have committed entire product lines to Fairtrade. All Olympic venues during the 2012 London Games will be selling Fairtrade refreshments.

Harriet Lamb was there from the start. First as a campaigner for the World Development Movement, which, along with Oxfam, Christian Aid and others, founded the Fairtrade Foundation 20 years ago this year; then through her time with Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International, based in Bonn, Germany before she joined the Fairtrade Foundation as executive director in 2001.

She was awarded a CBE in 2006 in recognition of her immense contribution to the Fairtrade phenomenon. She is driven by a sense of responsibility as raw and urgent today as it was when I first met her at WDM – that she must do all she can to help end the unjust global trade and financial systems that perpetuate poverty.

She has harangued government ministers, courted retail giants, met and listened to farmers in poor countries around the world, joined in the events of Fairtrade towns, schools and churches (of which there are some 7,000 – 300 of them United Reformed). She appears to inspire devotion among her staff. Her frequent, pealing laughter is a trademark, but she carries around her rage and heartbreak at the often appalling exploitation she has witnessed first-hand among workers who provide the food we depend upon and enjoy. It seems she will stop at nothing until the whole global trading system has been turned on its head to put people and justice first.

Did you ever imagine Fairtrade would grow this big?
It is almost breathtaking, if you think where we were 20 years ago when we started with this mad idea.

People used to say, oh yes, Fairtrade is just for a nice little niche, it’s for the little green ghetto, blah blah blah. But we never really accepted that, because there are millions of farmers and workers who depend on trade. We knew we had to have a bigger impact.

What are some of the influences that have shaped you?
I think definitely, living in India for three years as a child, and then going back at 18, and 21 – it gave me an interest in the developing world and as I got older, a determination that I would like to do something about the gap between the rich world and the poor world.

I just loved India. It gave me a positive view of development, because it was obvious to me that people can make poverty history for themselves if we get the structures of global trade and finance right.

When I went back again much later, aged about 23, I spent two years working in the rural areas with very deprived communities and I spent time, years before anyone had thought of Fairtrade in our way, with a community of so-called “untouchables”, the lowest of the low, who had tiny plots of land that had been mortgaged to the moneylenders and they had lost control of them.

I suppose it wasn’t that long after independence, and the Ghandian ideals and commitment to service were still really strong. Someone from the village helped them get their land back and pool their plots together, and on their pooled land, they started to grow export-quality grapes. They began exporting those grapes to Kuwait, and they were the first people in the whole area to buy a tractor.

And then, they were investing back into getting schooling, building themselves proper housing and so on. It was kind of a prototype. I think it really helped me, because I had that experience in my head of having seen how it could work and drive change.

Do you have any spiritual or religious leanings?
Yes, I am a part of St Saviour’s Church in Herne Hill, so I am part of that community. I have a very ecumenical perspective though. I believe all faiths have a role and people have different faiths depending on where they are born and brought up. It can’t be chance that whole parts of the world follow one faith and parts of the world follow another. It is inevitable, and I think the same tenements underpin all the great religions and actually that’s what matters – it is the fundamentals. The service bit can be different according to whether you are Christian or Muslim or Baha’i, depending on where you are born and what are the opportunities open to you.

What would you see as those fundamentals?
From a Christian perspective, it is love your neighbour as yourself. If you believe there is something greater than the material world or each of us individually, then actually you need to live that out in your daily life. I think that is a faith-based principle, but it can also be a secular one.

Ghandi said, be the change you want to see in the world. And that is the same principle, I think. Ghandi had a very “all-religions” perspective – and that’s all religions and none.

With your love of other countries and cultures, why did you choose to stay in Britain?
I felt it was my responsibility as a British woman – to change British policy and practices. That’s why I was involved in working to get a national minimum wage in Britain, working with low-paid people in Britain. I’ve worked with refugees who have come to Britain, and I have worked with the World Development Movement, before Fairtrade. And WDM is exactly about changing the policies and practices that keep people in poverty – things over which we have control. There are many things people can do for themselves in developing countries, but there are other things that are just unfair.

Is there anything you miss about those previous jobs, where maybe, for example, you had more freedom to criticise a government or company publicly?
I can, and do, speak very publicly and with as much anger I hope, about the fact there is still so much poverty among cocoa farmers or among tea farmers. What we wouldn’t do at the Fairtrade Foundation is name and shame particular companies. But I don’t miss that. I don’t feel any need to get into a slanging match with particular companies, so long as we can be absolutely clear that as a movement the Fairtrade Foundation does feel it is unfair and unacceptable that there is such poverty among farmers and workers who grow the food and drink that we all enjoy.

The reason we’ve got so much unfair trade is not because people are bad; it is because people don’t know. How are they to know that tea is so cheap because a woman on the other side of the world can’t send her kids to school, because she gets paid so little? Once they know that, they think well that’s wrong. And then you can say, well there is a positive alternative. I am a positive person and I think it is exciting to be part of creating a living alternative, not just shouting about the problems.

When you are dealing with certain companies, it can occasionally cause controversy can’t it, with people complaining about tokenism and so on?
What I would say first about that, is that what we are trying to do as a movement is incredibly difficult. What we are trying to do is to put rules into the market that actually run contrary to the market.

Along the way we are always meeting problems. The farmers have problems with the quality of the bananas, or there are issues about making sure there is no child labour; or about working with big companies where it might be seen as controversial. I think we have to be confident enough to have those debates with the public and to share with them our dilemmas, so they can see we are not doing this because we have fallen in love with big companies.

We are doing this, absolutely clearly, because if you want to drive change at scale for the farmers and workers, you have to engage with the big boys. Otherwise you are forever playing at the margins, and we are not interested in playing at the margins.

Along the way, what we have to be clear about is that our Fairtrade Mark is a stamp of approval on that product – we are not saying anything more broadly about the company. I think the public gets that.

Are farmers ever worse off after joining Fairtrade?
I hope no one has been worse off. But we have quite high standards about the levels of democratic organisation and transparency needed in the groups. So they do have to invest to come into Fairtrade; they work very, very hard to come in – it’s an equal relationship of rights and responsibilities on both sides. With the effort, and sometimes the financial investment involved, some groups may not straight away see enough sales.

An example would be that we’ve struggled to enable enough sales of cotton from West Africa at scale. Those farmers are hanging on in there; they believe in the principle so strongly. It is not that they are necessarily hugely better off in year one and year two at all. It’s the same with many tea estates in India, which are only selling three per cent of their produce Fairtrade – we need to get sales up to drive the change. But overwhelmingly people tend to stick in there because they believe in the principle.

I’m remembering a comment in your book, where you say you recall feeling your brain whirring and your hair going grey with stress. Is it still like that sometimes?
Absolutely, we still have problems. You are trying to reconcile seemingly irreconcileable interests. You try to adjust something to make it better for the farmers, and the trader says, that’s it, I’m pulling out, you’ve made it impossible for me! So then you adjust again and now it doesn’t work for the retailer; you go this way and it’s too expensive and the public won’t buy it. Sometimes it’s really tough to see a way out.

Do you get overwhelmed with the responsibility of it?
Well, sometimes you do think, Oh my goodness! Whereas before you would worry about one banana consignment, which was huge for that group, now it might be about the export of a whole nation! Well I’m exaggerating, but in a way, while it has got less precarious, what is at stake has got bigger.

The problem changes, what’s within your reach changes, and what people expect of you changes. But the reason I remain as energised by it as ever, is that it is still amazingly unique what we are doing. It is an incredible privilege to be able one day to talk to some amazing banana farmers or leaders, and then the next to meet with the chief executive of Sainsbury’s, and the next to talk with one of our Fairtrade groups up in Aberdeen – it is an extraordinary coming together of people across the world, and that’s what’s very inspiring about it. The schools and churches, they are incredible too.

How do issues about fairer trade connect with environmental issues?
We did some research and 76 per cent of all the farmers we surveyed say weather patterns have changed, and that’s negatively affected them. Eighty three per cent say they can’t afford adaptation or mitigation measures. There are definitely more hurricanes, more mudslides, but they are at the more visible end of the spectrum. Farmers are as affected, if not more so, by the fact that weather patterns have changed – they’ve lost the security of knowing what the season is going to do.

Can Fairtrade have an impact on problems like that?
We are looking at two things. We in the Foundation and also with our colleagues in FairTrade Africa, we were all in Durban lobbying for the big changes we want to see. In particular, the rich world has got to cut back its emissions on a dramatic level. At the same time, absolutely, we want, through Fairtrade, to help some of these farmers adapt to climate change, mitigate against the worst effects and find new ways of working. Once farmers have come together through Fairtrade and organised in a group, you can start to work with that group – support them, invest, bring in new technology, put them in touch with the latest research, whatever it might be, and there are ways that companies can engage in helping those farmers adapt and mitigate.

But are companies motivated to do that?
Well ultimately it is about sustainability for their products. With some commodities, there is a real danger they will run out. Unless farmers can adapt to the effects of climate change there may soon be no chocolate, coffee or bananas for big companies to sell. And it’s not just climate change – many companies are waking up to the shock that farmers may not carry on growing their crops unless they able to capture more of the value of them.

One of the reasons Cadbury’s first went Fairtrade is because they realised to their horror that the average age of a cocoa farmer in Ghana is 56. I went out to Ghana with the chief executive of Cadbury’s and we met a farmer called Benjamin Atiemo and all the while he was drying his cocoa beans, and he was a bit shy in front of this chief executive, and he explained: All my sons have gone to Accra, they haven’t got jobs, they’re living rough, but they don’t see a future in growing cocoa, they just think it is drudgery for no money. Cadbury’s say that was a complete wake up call for them: no beans, no bars. It was that moment that really made the sustainability case from an economic and social point of view.

I hear Chichester Cathedral is now sporting the first ever Fairtrade gold-plated weather vane.
That was so exciting! The first ever use of Fairtrade gold as an ecclesiastical tool. We would really encourage churches, if you are looking at any gilding, why not use Fairtrade and Fairmined gold?

So what’s been happening with Fairtrade gold?
Five years ago, we were first approached by miners from Columbia, who were trying to mine gold in a more ecological way – not using cyanide and mercury, but they just couldn’t get a high enough price to enable them to do that. So we started working with them on what we call Fairtrade and Fairmined gold.

We’ve now got three groups we are working with – in Peru, Bolivia and Columbia and we hope there’ll be three more coming through this year. We are gradually figuring out how could it work in Africa.

Mining is one of the harshest industries to work in isn’t it – what kind of difference can you really make?
It is a journey, a long process; it is not about overnight change. Gradually, as the mining groups get more income, they can manage chemicals and so on in a safer way. There are people who say, there are so many problems in mining, Fairtrade shouldn’t go there. But we say the opposite.

It’s nearly Fairtrade Fortnight [27 February to 11 March]. What kind of response are you hoping for this year?
For 2012 we are saying, Take a Step for Fairtrade – we are trying to get 1.5 million steps registered on our website. It could be you register because you have just bought a Faitrade and Fairmined wedding ring. It could be a tiny thing – you start buying Fairtrade rice for the first time; or a company might take a huge step, where they commit to switch a whole range to Fairtrade, or to help the producers with climate change.

Churches do so much already, but you could have Fairtrade Communion wine, your surplice could be made of Fairtrade cotton. You could switch to Fairtrade tea and coffee if you haven’t done so yet. Fairtrade flowers. You could virtually do a whole Fairtrade wedding!

When will you finally feel satisfied with what you have achieved with Fairtrade?
It still feels so much as though we are at the start – I can’t see in the next few years being able to say, oh marvellous, job done! I think this is the work of decades. What is exciting about Fairtrade is that so many people are part of it right cross the world. There is absolutely a collective effort of everyone, from the farmers through to the churches – who have supported it from day one, and whose continuing support is absolutely critical if we are going to tip the balance.

A Fairtrade Fortnight guide for churches is available at: http://step.fairtrade.org.uk get-involved/i-am-a-supporter

This article appeared in the February 2012 issue of Reform.

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