Carla Veldhuyzen van Zanten

Carla has been leading Fairtrade International’s strategy design for greater impact on farmer livelihoods beyond certification for the past five years, with living income as a key focus area. Her field experience, research based evidence, inventories of best practice and broad stakeholder engagement provided the inputs for a holistic roadmap, including a living income reference price model, towards sustainable livelihoods of smallholders at the source of commodity supply chains.
For ten years prior to this, Carla managed Fairtrade’s regional operations in the Andean region, based in Colombia. As a regional manager she was in charge of setting up a producer support programme and overseeing its implementation by a multidisciplinary team of liaison officers, attending over 300 smallholder and worker organizations with the aim to build viable, reliable and resilient farmer organizations through strengthening their organizational governance and business management capacity.

She is passionate about producer centered transformation of trade systems, which can only be accomplished through effective coordination of efforts among stakeholders. Current activities are geared towards joint implementation of living income approaches with supply chain partners to generate evidence needed for roll-out at scale.