Harriet Lamb

Harriet Lamb CBE (born 3 June 1961) is the Chief Executive Officer of peacebuilding organisation International Alert, a role she took in November 2015. She was Executive Director of the United Kingdom Fairtrade Foundation from 2001-2012. Prior to this she was a leading campaigner for fair trade. In September 2012 she became Chief Executive Officer of the global standards, certification and producer development organisation, Fairtrade International. She was Executive Director of the United Kingdom Fairtrade Foundation from 2001-2012.

Lamb was born in England, lived in India as a child and then grew up and was educated in the UK, taking a first degree in political science at Cambridge University and an MPhil at the Sussex Institute of Development Studies.

She has lived over six years in India including time working with poor landless labourers and with a cooperative of low-caste "untouchable" farmers selling grapes.

She joined the Fairtrade Foundation after two years with Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), the Fairtrade umbrella body with responsibility for Fairtrade standards globally, in Bonn, Germany. Under her leadership, Fairtrade has become one of Britain's most active grassroots social movements. In 2008, sales of Fairtrade topped £700 million, with over 4,500 Fairtrade products available from cotton to coffee, face-cream to ice-cream.

She had become convinced of the importance of Fairtrade while Head of Campaigns at the World Development Movement (WDM). While visiting Costa Rica with WDM in 1997 to investigate local banana plantations' use of the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP), already banned in the US for making farm-workers sterile, she met a woman called Maria whose husband had been exposed to DBCP while working on the plantations. The couple had had a baby boy born with severe developmental abnormalities who died after a short and distressful life.

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