The Living Income In-Person Workshop 2025 – Pathways for Income Improvement: Unlocking Opportunities for Smallholders in Asia, organised by GIZ and the ISEAL Alliance, stood out as one of the region’s most influential convenings dedicated to shifting the trajectory of smallholder livelihoods.

Designed as an immersive, solution-driven platform, the workshop aimed to deepen collective action on closing income gaps by aligning policies, market strategies, and field-level interventions across sectors and systems.

The gathering brought together practitioners, farmer cooperatives, traders, brands, NGOs, and global development partners to examine the practical application of the Living Income Framework, assess persistent challenges, and co-design pathways for delivering measurable, positive change for farmers across Asia’s diverse commodity landscapes.

Indonesia, with its dynamic multi-commodity economy, robust domestic markets, and thriving community of living-income initiatives, offered an ideal setting. Its mix of coffee, palm, rice, coconut sugar, and spice sectors—interwoven with complex market realities, land-governance complexities, and equity considerations—provided perfect ground for context-specific, scalable solutions.

For Fairtrade NAPP, this moment represented a strategic inflection point: an opportunity to elevate farmer voices, reinforce regional collaboration, and strengthen living-income advocacy across supply chains that are vital to Asia’s economic future.

Represented by Intan Wahyoe, Program Manager, Indonesia, Erwin Noviantor, Senior Manager, Strategic Development, Southeast Asia & PNG, and Rodrigo Avilés, Programme Coordinator for Sustainable Livelihoods & Decent Work, the Fairtrade delegation brought a strategic blend of institutional perspective and grounded field experience to the dialogue.

A defining moment of the workshop was the powerful contribution of Subanul Arif, a young farmer member and secretary of Koperasi Nira Kamukten, a Fairtrade coconut sugar cooperative from Indonesia, who delivered one of the workshop’s most resonant moments.

Speaking on the panel “Practical Applications of Living Income in Coffee and Palm,” he bridged the gap between conceptual frameworks and lived realities, reminding the audience that living income is ultimately about human dignity and the future of farming:

“As a young member of a farming family, I believe that if the issue of farmers’ living income is not addressed, the next generation will turn away from agriculture, and we will face a dramatically smaller farming community in the future. I hope that society- not only businesses—recognises the urgency of this issue and chooses to care. Knowing that there are people who genuinely support farmers gives me and my cooperative renewed motivation. We are trying to do better in diversifying the income sources of our farmers”.

Subanul's testimony underscored a truth often missed in global dialogue: without guaranteeing a dignified income, the future of agriculture itself is at risk.

A Program Engineered for Systemic Change

The workshop’s two-day program was designed to turn insight into action, blending conceptual grounding, practical case studies, cross-sector dialogue, and strategic networking to examine what it truly takes to close living-income gaps at scale. Participants first explored the Living Income Framework and its applications in coffee and palm, then moved into deeper discussions on aligning economic resilience with environmental sustainability, adopting landscape-level approaches, embedding equity and inclusion for smallholders, and innovating measurement tools to track and close income gaps sustainably. Together, these sessions ensured that technical expertise, farmer perspectives, and cross-sector collaboration reinforced one another—laying a strong foundation for scalable, systems-driven change across Asian supply chains.

For Fairtrade NAPP, this structure offered an important opportunity to ensure farmer realities shaped policy and investment dialogues, while forging meaningful relationships across commodities and regions.

Building Bridges — Networks, Partnerships, and Momentum

Beyond the formal agenda, the workshop served as an important platform for network-building and strategic engagement, to promote Fairtrade’s holistic living-income approach — one that goes beyond certification alone, emphasizing fair prices, sustainable production, market access, advocacy, and enabling environments for producers to thrive.

As global supply chains grapple with climate, social, and economic risks, living income becomes extremely essential for building supply-chain resilience, social equity, and long-term sustainability. The momentum built in Jakarta demonstrates what is possible when producers, practitioners, and policymakers unite around a shared goal.