Bruce Crowther

Bruce Crowther grew up in and around Garstang, a small market town in Lancashire, England, and worked for years in ordinary jobs, including in a local textile mill, long before anyone would have described him as any kind of business pioneer. His interest in fair trade grew from involvement with Oxfam and church groups concerned about the low prices paid to farmers in poorer countries for coffee, cocoa and other goods sold cheaply on to wealthy consumers.

In 2000 he and a small group of local campaigners set out to persuade Garstang's shops, cafes, churches, schools and council to commit to stocking and using Fairtrade certified products wherever practical, a modest, unglamorous campaign of leafleting, meetings and quiet persuasion rather than any grand launch. Garstang's town council agreed, and in April 2000 it was declared the world's first Fairtrade Town, a designation Crowther and his colleagues had effectively invented as they went along.

The idea spread with startling speed. Within a few years thousands of towns and cities across Britain and then dozens of other countries had adopted similar Fairtrade town campaigns, each requiring local shops, workplaces and institutions to commit to stocking fairly traded goods, a grassroots retail movement that gave small consumer choices a direct link to farmers' incomes abroad.

Crowther stayed in Garstang, continuing to work on fair trade advocacy through the Fairtrade Foundation and related groups for decades afterward, remaining, by choice, a local campaigner in a small town rather than moving into a larger national organisation.