BONN, Germany – As part of its growing portfolio of digital tools to help companies better understand how they can work to make sustainable supply chains a reality, Fairtrade International has built a new Living Income Reference Price tool. The tool, which is also accessible from Fairtrade International website, is designed to make it easier for companies to find out what prices they need to pay to enable living incomes and living wages.
Through an interactive map, users can look up Living Income Reference Prices by commodity or country. The users can also download a report that shows the factors that go into each price and how they were calculated.
Plus, there is a section that provides valuable information about Fairtrade’s Living Income strategy that puts decent livelihoods as a central element of sustainability.
To date, Fairtrade has more than a dozen country- or region-specific Living Income Reference Prices developed through a robust research and validation process with farmers and other local industry experts. The products are cocoa, coffee, coconuts, cashews, and mangoes, among others. Fairtrade also develops prices for companies, either based on a specific set of producers in a supply chain, or on a specific origin.
The tool, which will be updated with new information as it becomes available, is accessible in multiple languages including English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Living Wage Reference Prices will also be added to the tool, as Fairtrade launched its first such reference price for bananas in 2023.
Fairtrade’s 2021-2025 Global Strategy is built on four strategic priorities including digitalisation for fairer supply chains, which is Fairtrade’s focus on data, transparency, and traceability.
The new Living Income Reference Price tool is part of Fairtrade’s work in this area that includes among many initiatives a group of new digital tools such as Fairtrade Impact Map (2024) and the Fairtrade Risk Map (2023)to assist Fairtrade stakeholders.
The Fairtrade Impact Map displays data and information on more than 100 Fairtrade projects and commissioned studies around the world. The users of the tool can explore by country, region, commodity, theme, programme, or year.
They can also find key producer data by country, including number of producer organisations, farmers and workers, the Fairtrade products and volumes grown and sold, and the amount of Fairtrade Premium earned. The Fairtrade Risk Map supports all actors in global supply chains – farmers, worker organisations, retailers, brands – in assessing their human rights and environmental risks. Here too, users have a few options to explore by including country, commodity, or issue.
In 2023, Fairtrade launched its Banana Dashboard, a one-stop shop for cooperatives, traders, and retailers can learn more about Fairtrade banana producers, the advantages of Fairtrade certification system, including the Premium and how it’s used by producers, and opportunities to deepen relationships and impact on issues such as living wages and climate. Fairtrade plans to expand this type of dashboard into other key product areas in the future.
