Fairtrade Fortnight 2025 runs from 22 September to 5 October, and this year is urging retailers and consumers to ‘Do it Fair’.
“From a business perspective, with the growing risks to our food supply chains, there’s never been a more important time to be purchasing on fair trading terms and fair working conditions,” says Eleanor Harrison.
“And if you’re a consumer, proactively buy Fairtrade certified products. There are some phenomenal, awesome products available, and together we can collectively ‘Do it Fair’ to bring up standards worldwide.”
Harrison was appointed CEO of the UK’s Fairtrade Foundation earlier this year, and sees the Fairtrade and co-operative movements as inextricably linked.
“We are nothing in the Fairtrade movement without the co-operative structure, which is how so many of our producers are organised,” she says.
“How do you bring people together? How do you share your knowledge and assets, but also use that collective strength to negotiate and thrive on your own terms, rather than what others think is good? Fairtrade and the co-operative movements are the very essence of that in action.”
Everything in Harrison’s career has been about “helping individuals and communities unlock innate agency,” she says, from working with refugee communities in Birmingham and young people in Kenya, to the Fairtrade movement worldwide. In 2016, she was awarded an OBE, for services to international development.
“Fairtrade really speaks to my values, that mixture of being an ethical consumer, but also a social activist,” she adds. “Let’s face it, the world is complicated and overwhelming, and I do not believe that a collection of individuals, just working as individuals, can deliver the type of society we all want. We need to work together.”
Harrison describes her values as hope, fairness and joy, and traces them to an upbringing in the Christian church – “but the activist side” – and parents who were very active in community organising.
“I was involved in some of the very early Fairtrade Fortnights, and was fortunate to be able to volunteer support around Wrexham becoming the first Fairtrade town in Wales. I got involved in lots of volunteering and community projects, and that gave me kind of significant exposure to people from all walks of life. That definitely influenced who I am today.”
After six months in post, she has big plans for the Fairtrade movement.
“Number one is to build the Fairtrade market to grow market access on fair terms. The second thing is looking at how to use that power, not only to build access and negotiate better prices, but to futureproof our food supply system.
Related: Fairtrade Foundation launches Brew it Fair campaign to support tea workers
“We have such deep inequalities in our trade system and they are only growing with constant mergers and acquisitions and the further consolidation of capital. Co-operatives, to me, are one of the few proven mechanisms by which we bring people together to try and rebalance the imbalances of the trade system. And I think the only way forward is for us to further grow that mission.”
In the UK, the co-operative movement is lobbying the current government, which signalled its intent to double the mutual and co-operative movement, on a number of issues. The Fairtrade Foundation is attempting to bring about new legislation around human rights and environmental due diligence, with over 70 MPs already showing their support by signing an Early Day Motion focusing on tea.
The motion “condemns the grave working conditions that many tea-growing communities face across the world” and “calls for UK legislation to make it mandatory for businesses to carry out human rights and environmental due diligence in their supply chains”. It also “urges the government to honour its International Climate Finance commitment to support tea growing communities to adapt and build resilience to climate change”.
Globally, only 4% of tea that is grown on Fairtrade-certified tea farms or estates is currently being sold on Fairtrade terms. In the UK, Fairtrade tea makes up 10% of all tea that is sold.
“We really welcome Sainsbury’s recently converting all its own-brand tea to being Fairtrade. Co-operatives have also been leading on this for a long time, but we would like to see that market share grow significantly,” says Harrison. “We think it needs to be a minimum of 20% to enable enough Fairtrade premium to get through to see the change we need.”
The organisation’s ‘Do It Fair’ campaign for Fairtrade Fortnight sits alongside its ‘Brew it Fair’ initiative, launched in May. “This is a big tea campaign based on the principle that whether you are a consumer, a business, or farmers and workers, we can collectively act fairly to bring up standards and mitigate risks,” she adds.
“For Fairtrade Fortnight, we have done a survey with Kantar which highlighted public awareness about human rights and environmental due diligence; 59% of the public are already proactively, positively supporting such legislation and over 70 MPs are supporting the Early Day Motion.”
Harrison highlights how when products are sold on certified terms, “that leads to a step change in terms of climate resilience and economic prosperity.”
And this is vital, she says, because there is real risk of human rights, economic prosperity and sustainable livelihoods being delinked from the state of the environment.
“That cannot be the case. You cannot help the environment without helping the people. And because of this, from an environmental perspective, we’ve never made a greater investment in terms of not only how we mitigate for climate, but face into challenges with resilience.”
Another concern brought up by Fairtrade’s producers – and one Harrison hopes will be addressed at the upcoming World Social Summit – is around legislation compliance.
“There’s a lot of legislation and new frameworks kicking around, but the burden of compliance cannot be on producers and farmers. What we have seen increasingly in the bid to do good is that sometimes policymakers are not thinking about fairness and equitability, and the pressure grows. And at the moment, we see far too much compliance burden and cost being put on producers. And so we see that Fairtrade has a real role to play in making sure that producers are at the centre of some of the legislation happening in the UK.”
Harrison has lofty aims for the movement – including a minimum of 20% market share for all Fairtrade’s core products (tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar and flowers) within five years. Currently, only bananas have that market reach (sitting at 25% in the UK), which has been “transformational in terms of providing a living wage for producers”.
Another focus is data. “I’d like us to really harness and be a market leader in terms of ethical, fair data and technology,” she says. “We know that technology is transforming future supply chains, but it is very much on business terms at the moment, and we have a small sliver of time in which we make sure that data use is transparent, traceable, accessible and meaningful for producers and workers.
Harrison adds: “Thirty years ago, Fairtrade disrupted the market. We showed it was possible to be fair, and now we’re in the mainstream, but I’d still argue we’re on the edge of the mainstream. So how do we disrupt the market again? Fairtrade is doing some phenomenal work, but I also feel restless for the further push that we need to make together.”
Fairtrade Fortnight runs from 22 September to 5 October. Find your nearest event here.
Find out more about the Fairtrade Foundation’s petition for fairer tea here.
