Development People - Harriet lamb
Harriet Lamb, Executive Director of Fairtrade Foundation, talks about NGO leadership and the private sector, staying innovative and the effectiveness agenda.
Why did you want to work at Fairtrade Foundation?
I was attracted to Fairtrade Foundation because of its unique alliance of working with the public, including some fantastically dedicated campaigners, the farmers who are part-owners and drivers of our system and the brands, retailers and ‘big boys’ of business, as well as NGOs. It is this combination of different world’s coming together, united behind something incredibly practical and also incredibly radical and challenging, which still really appeals to me.
What are you are working on at the moment?
Our strategic aim is to see if we can take this amazing movement to scale to ‘tip the balance’ in favour of farmers and workers in developing countries. Can we get to a situation where half of all bananas are fair trade, or where the cocoa cooperative in Ghana is a real player in the cocoa industry meaning that it can sit down with the government and discuss principles about exporting cocoa and getting fair prices back to the farmers? We need to keep on pushing it to the next level as it is still just a tiny percentage of global trade.
How we better tell the story of our impact is a challenge but it’s absolutely right that we provide evidence that we make a difference.
We are also looking at new products. We recently launched fair trade gold which opened the door to a whole new sector, and there are many more examples like that. Staying innovative is absolutely critical and this includes finding ways to truly push the centre of gravity south. How can the fair trade movement be increasingly owned and run from the south? To make it a global phenomenon and we must show leadership on this.
What are the bigger issues/challenges that Fairtrade Foundation is grappling with at the moment?
There are constant challenges. How do we retain that innovative edge whilst protecting what we already have, particularly in a recession? The downturn is an enormous challenge for the producers themselves, many of whom are getting higher prices for their products but are seeing their costs soar so in real terms they are a lot worse off.
Another big debate is around how we shift the centre of gravity south without risking all that we have built here in the UK and Europe. So, how do we accelerate the growth of sales in Europe while at the same time build fair trade in the south?
Fairtrade Foundation has been very successful at working with the private sector. How important is it that NGOs lead the way in harnessing the power of business for the benefit of development?
NGO leadership is very important but I just don’t see it happening at the moment and in many cases companies are just going ahead without NGOs involvement at all. I think NGOs have a critical role to play in a more conventional way which is about shining a spotlight on business that is not playing a positive role, and indeed when business practices are exploitative or where companies don’t have enough overview of their supply chain or know where some of their products and services are coming from. I believe that there is still a role for NGOs to share concerns and give voice to farmers and workers.
We also have to be ready to acknowledge good practice and work with companies to marry their extraordinary power and resources behind development and the anti-poverty agenda. This isn’t easy. We need NGOs to engage in this constant balancing act to pull in the private sector and find the models and mechanisms to make it work for them. There is also a challenge to the private sector to get the most out of working with NGOs.
What is Fairtrade Foundation’s approach to the effectiveness and ‘results’ agendas?
How we better tell the story of our impact is a challenge but it’s absolutely right that we provide evidence that we make a difference. We need to constantly know where we are having an impact and in what way so that we can adapt and change and improve on the one hand and excite and galvanise people to get behind us on the other.
Fairtrade Foundation has invested a lot of resources into trying to communicate our impact and the risk for all of us is where critical areas of our work can be undermined if we interpret the principles of effectiveness too narrowly. We can always talk about the public awareness of fair trade, sales per product and per country, how many farmers we are reaching – absolutely concrete results - but really we are here to empower farmers and workers. How do you measure empowerment, or show attribution, for instance? This is much more difficult especially as some of these things take years.
What are your hopes for the upcoming G20 meeting?
We need to think about how to represent the interests and voices of the poorest countries and how the G20 can address their agenda. To be honest we are not expecting any meaningful commitment or progress on trade policy given the effective collapse of Doha, to the shame of the world leaders. Five years ago, trade was at the top of the agenda and now it has completely collapsed. It’s gone from being the issue that could unlock economic growth and tackle poverty to hardly ever being mentioned. It’s a failure of leadership on the part of the major nations although the UK government continues to push very hard on this issue.
We particularly want to see progress on the EU and US subsidies to cotton farmers which is one of the most extreme example of unfair trade today whereby the US and EU subsidise cotton farmers who then grow too much and dump it on world markets pulling down prices. This directly leads to increasing poverty in West Africa. The West African cotton nations have said time and time again that we have got to get a fair deal on cotton so solving this is absolutely critical.
We also want to see previous commitments to agriculture maintained, with particular focus on the role of smallholders
What is the best professional advice you have been given?
To stay innovative and find new and different ways of doing things, to remain edgy especially when times are tough, so that you come out fighting and on top.
Harriet Lamb CBE has been Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation since 2001.
Established in 1992, The Fairtrade Foundation is the independent non-profit organisation that licenses use of the FAIRTRADE Mark on products in the UK in accordance with internationally agreed Fairtrade standards.
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