My colleague Rachel Abel and I have returned home to (slightly!) warmer climes after a very eventful trip to Nuremberg, Germany, for the world’s largest organic trade fair, BioFach. The event has been a great opportunity for us to catch up with many customers, both old and new, customers who we rarely get to see as they can be over 6000 miles away!

Rachel’s extremely busy task was to catch up with not only as many of her Latin American customers as possible, but also to meet up and discuss the accounts of the other three regions, Africa, North America, the Pacific Rim and Europe! Opportunities to see so many customers in one place are rare so we must make the most of them when they come along.

I also had a great opportunity, to meet up with other social lenders as well as many of the Fair Trade and Organic Certification networks, FLO, Rain Forest Alliance and IMO to mention a few. BioFach gives Shared Interest the chance to find out what is happening in the world of Fair Trade and it was certainly interesting to see the discussions between the different certifiers and how certification impacts on the producers and their livelihoods; should there be one Fair Trade certification? Should the certifiers be working together for the good of the producers? These were some of the key questions that were raised and ones which I am sure will be debated for some time to come!

Rachel and I left the event feeling that BioFach is a very significant and worthwhile event for Shared Interest (not just because we got to try many of the tasty and too tempting Fair Trade chocolates!) as the event, attended by over 4000 organic and Fair Trade exhibitors, brings together many of the organisations involved in fair trade who we might otherwise never get to see.

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