Fair Trade Management
Bachelor of Agri Systems Management
Career opportunities
As a graduate in Fair Trade Management/Agri Systems Management, you will have gained a professional knowledge of sustainable agricultural products and of the management of an agricultural chain. You will be active in countries and agri-sectors that are developing. It concerns local, regional or international agri-production and sale. You will be active especially in the beginning of the chain (stands up for the interest of the producer). In doing so you deal with farmers/market gardeners (mostly women), producers organisations (agricultural cooperatives) and purchasing organisations (Fair Trade, Max Havelaar Import-Export companies). And also with government organisations and NGO's.
Because of the increasing emphasis on sustainable entrepreneurship (people-planet-profit) and supply-chain management chain management becomes more and more important. You are challenged to come up with a strategic and practical interpretation for how to deal with social, economic and environmental interests (people-planet-profit) and to combine these three elements harmonious. In doing so you do not only focus on project control but also process control. In order to perform these tasks adequately you operate from chain knowledge in combination with market politics. The specific knowledge of product and quality (knowledge of how the crops grow) and the ability to speak a foreign language will make you someone who can communicate with farmers and is able to intermediate between and within the different groups in a competitive field. Additionally you are solution-oriented, pro-active, systematic, emphatic and communicative.
As an Agri Systems Manager all kinds of jobs await you - in Europe and the tropics alike. You may become a production manager on a tropical farm, a chain development manager or a consultant in one of a range of commercial or noncommercial organisations. Other job examples are: Sourcing Manager for AgroFair, buying fruits from tropical countries, Project Manager for Oxfam-Novib, Regional Coordinator for Fair-trade Labelling Organisation International (FLO) in Central America, Certification Analyst for FLO Cert GmbH, evaluating fair trade standards.
Fouad Lakhal
student Fair Trade Management
"In the future I would like to have a positive influence on the less privileged in rural areas. I would like to enable the people in these regions to canalise their experience, knowledge and strengths, so they will be able to manufacture quality products. What interests me most is rural cultural heritage and the challenge to preserve indigenous knowledge. I partially grew up in Morocco where I witnessed an extreme transition from sound traditional farming practices to the exploitative nature of 'modern farming' as it known there and more recently during my internship in Malaysia."
"...to help them gain a better price for their products. ""