Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation, has been awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Aston University.

The accolade has been awarded in recognition of her work in bringing together UK consumers with farmers and workers in the developing world and making trade fairer.

Lamb was presented with the degree at a ceremony in Birmingham as the university also gave an award to Perween Warsi CBE, founder and chief executive of S&A foods.

Lamb said: “Congratulations to Aston University for achieving Fairtrade university status and in particular ensuring that every student and the wider community at Aston knows about Fairtrade.

“It’s an achievement for the students, but also the caterers, senior managers and university staff. I am deeply honoured today to receive this degree from such a great university, which just happens to be in Birmingham. which is a Fairtrade city. Universities play a crucial role in the wider Fairtrade grassroots social movement, and make a real difference in leveraging change for producers in the developing world.

“For me, the key impact of the Fairtrade system is how much it matters to the farmers. It gives the farmers and workers a sense of pride that someone in the UK is choosing their product because of the Fairtrade label; they become something more than a distant, forgotten producer at the end of a very long supply chain.”

Harriet Lamb has been executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation since 2001 and steered it through a period of impressive growth, which has seen estimated sales of Fairtrade products in the UK increase from £30 million in her first year to in excess of £700m in 2008.

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