From fair price to a fair future: the Fairtrade Access Fund 2025 Impact Report is here

The Fairtrade Access Fund has published its 2025 Impact Report – a look at how the Fund is helping smallholder farmers build resilience as climate and market pressures intensify.

It was the Fund’s biggest year yet. In 2025 the Fund disbursed USD 100 million across 44 investees in 17 countries, reaching 545,850 smallholder farmers, 86% of whom work fewer than five hectares of land. Average revenue per farmer from sales to the Fund’s investees rose by 10% to USD 4,247, total purchases from smallholders surpassed USD 2 billion, and sustainability premiums grew by 76% to USD 82 million. After a challenging period in the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the Fund closed the year with a USD 1.9 million profit – confirmation that a turnaround set in motion in 2023 has taken hold.

The report’s title reflects a shift in what the Fund’s founding promise now means. Fairness for farmers began as a question of price. Today it means more: helping farmers navigate unpredictable weather, volatile markets, and rising regulatory demands. The Fund has widened its toolkit accordingly – supporting farming practices that restore the land, infrastructure that reduces risk, diversification that stabilises income, technology that levels the playing field, and Payments for Ecosystem Services.

That last area was the Fund’s most significant new direction in 2025. With EUR 10 million committed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through KfW, the Fund deployed its first impact-linked loans to two coffee partners – Equation Coffee in Colombia and Aldea Coffee in Nicaragua – paying farmers for the environmental value they create through soil regeneration, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity protection.

The report tells these stories through the people doing the work: a biochar model restoring soils in Colombia’s coffee belt, mechanisation cutting risk for paddy farmers in Sri Lanka, smallholder integration at scale in Peru, and a community-rooted macadamia business in Kenya.