Crucial to FLO’s transparency and credibility is the participation of traders, producers and other stakeholders in FLO’s governance. Therefore, at the FLO Fairtrade Forum, held every three years, the producers and traders elect their representatives in the FLO Board of Directors. The National labelling organisations elect their representatives to the Board every third year, during their Meeting of Members.

The Director of FLO is responsible towards the Board for the running of the organisation and in particular to the Operational Board for finance and personnel matters.

FLO’s main tasks are:

1) Guaranteeing the standards:
FLO gives credibility to the Fairtrade Labels by providing independent, transparent and competent standard setting and certification of social and economic development.

Fairtrade Standards and policies are proposed by the Standards and Policy Committee, again a body with a wide stakeholder representation, which puts Standards and policy proposals forward to the FLO Board for approval.

To ensure that producers comply with Fairtrade standards, FLO works with a network of independent inspectors that regularly visit all producer organisations and report back to the FLO Certification Ltd, which prepares the meetings of the Certification Committee and organises the inspections in the field.

It is the Certification Committee, comprised of stakeholders from producers, traders, national labelling organisations and external experts, which takes the Certification decisions. Appeals on these decisions are dealt with by an Appeals Committee.

To monitor traders’ and retailers’ compliance with Fairtrade conditions, a specially developed trade auditing system checks that every Fairtrade-labelled product sold to a consumer has indeed been produced by a certified producer organisation which has been paid the Fairtrade price. The Trade Certification Unit within FLO Cert Ltd deals with the control of all trade partners in the system.

2) Producer Business Unit (PBU):
In the PBU, each continent has a Regional Manager, responsible for all developments within that area and also for the work of Regional Coordinators who have specific country responsibility within that continent. All staff within the PBU also have product responsibility. There tends, wherever possible, to be a natural connection between the regional and product responsibility. As an example, the Central American Coordinator is also responsible for coffee. The PBU is in direct contact with producers, understanding the specific needs of each producer and trying to match their supply potential with market demand.

3) Local liaisons officers in the producer countries:
Another key for the PBU working structure are the Local Liaison Officers. Currently there are nine working in different producer countries. They are responsible for building up dynamic relationships with producers, understanding the specific needs of each one and trying to match their supply potential with market demand.


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