Fairtrade supporters conference

It was the Fairtrade Supporters Conference in London today, one of the best Fairtrade Foundation conferences I've attended.

I would have liked to have seen more reflection about the future of Fairtrade campaigning in the UK. This sort of conference could be the space for genuine consultation and strategic debate about the direction of the Fairtrade movement. As it is, they are always rather top-down in approach and tend to take the campaigners for granted, treating them as a resource to be deployed rather than as co-creators in a shared endeavour.

Nevertheless, the conference still did a great job making us feel part of a campaigning community, stoking up enthusiasm and sharing useful information. It was good to hear about DFID's £12m of new investment in Fairtrade, aiming to bring another million producers into the system. Harriet Lamb described how costly and time consuming it can be to bring new producers or commodities into the system, using the example of Zaytoun olive oil from Palestine which took over five years to certify Fairtrade. For all the success of Fairtrade, it still requires substantial external investments to scale up and deepen its impact.

The final panel discussion of the day - "what role does fairness play in sustainable consumption" - was particularly interesting.