Face of Flanders: Lily Deforce

When Lily Deforce took up her post as CEO of Max Havelaar in 2008, barely one in four families bought anything with a fair trade label. Eight years later, Deforce is stepping down, the organisation has changed its name to Fairtrade Belgium, and the percentage of those buying fair trade products has more than doubled to 53%.

Last year, Belgium supermarkets and other outlets sold €115.5 million in fair trade products. The most popular items purchased were bananas, chocolate and coffee. “We consciously created a recognition of fair trade with those products,” Deforce, 51, told De Standaard last week, “which allows us to diversify our range. That way people learned about our other products such as waffles, tea, rice and even wine.”

When she arrived, fair trade had something of a hippy, right-on reputation, being marketed under the name of Max Havelaar, an 1860 Dutch novel about the colonial coffee trade. Her background was a mix: the Mechelen-based seeds company Somers Seeds, the charity Vredeseilanden and the multinational Procter & Gamble.

IN 2008, fewer than 40 companies used fair trade goods in their production lines. Now Fairtrade Belgium has contracts with 95 Belgian companies and 65 abroad. Last year, it sold nearly 11% more than in 2014, but the company is taking up a larger part of a pie that’s not itself growing much at all. Supply is outstripping demand. “We have more farmers offering fair trade products than there are shoppers in the stores,” she told De Standaard.

Deforce steps down on 1 June and will spend six months working on a series of smaller projects. “I want to have control over my own diary for a while,” she said. In 2017, the hunt for a new job will begin.

Photo © Hendrik De Schrijver/Fairtrade Belgium