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11 Apr 2017
Fairtrade Farmers and Workers continue to benefit from Growing Sales and Increased Fairtrade Premium Investments
This week saw the official launch of the 8th edition of the Monitoring the Scope and Benefits of Fairtrade report by Fairtrade International, covering data from 2014-2015.
This week saw the official launch of the 8th edition of the Monitoring the Scope and Benefits of Fairtrade report by Fairtrade International, covering data from 2014-2015.
The report focuses on six major thematic areas – producer organizations, farmers, workers, women, production and sales, and the Fairtrade Premium – and three regions – Africa and the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific.
Providing insights into the scope and scale of Fairtrade, it analyses the extent, nature, and distribution of the benefits generated by the Fairtrade system for participating farmers and hired workers.
In 2015, the number of Fairtrade farmers and hired workers slightly grew by one percent to 1.66 million. This figure reflects a similar increase in the number of Fairtrade-certified producer organizations.
Fairtrade Premium payments - the extra sum of money paid to producer organizations to farmers on top of the selling price - grew by ten percent and producers’ Fairtrade sales revenues were up by 14 percent - mainly due to growth in banana, coffee, cocoa and flower sales. In total, more than €117 million of Fairtrade Premium were channelled to Fairtrade-certified organizations.
“The report offers an excellent summary of where Fairtrade is and what is happening in the field with farmers and workers. It includes very encouraging figures. The report also clearly shows that in order to make a greater difference to the lives of farmers and hired workers around the world, we need to scale up the reach of our work,” said Dario Soto Abril, Fairtrade International’s newly appointed Global CEO.
The information presented is based on the monitoring information that Fairtrade International regularly collects from all certified producer organizations through auditing and producer support processes.
The data is analysed and published on a yearly basis, providing a detailed picture of the experiences of farmers and workers in Fairtrade supply chains. The latest report also presents the results of the first in a series of household surveys aimed at assessing long-term changes in farmers’ lives following Fairtrade certification.
Click here for the full report