Luuk Zonneveld

Making business work for development

Travelling through Africa and Asia as freelance journalist from 1986 until 1989, articles appearing in Dutch national newspapers and weekly news magazines.

1989-92: managed producer relations and purchasing from Africa and Latin America for the Dutch Fair Trade company FTO, contributing to FTO’s tripling of turnover during this period.

Throughout the 1990s, reports and studies for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Oxfam development agencies, the Belgian government and others on opportunities to support civil society and economic development in Africa and Latin America

In recent years, focus on the relation between international policy, local “business for development” and achieving the UN’s Millenium Goals. Read:

• main article of FLO’s Annual Report 06-07 (2007, 2 pages, in English, pdf)
  “Last June, I visited […] Samabeong Tea Estate, hidden in the forests of the Himalaya foothills….”
  
  
• idem 05-06
  “From now on, you are no longer small and poor,” René Mendoza of Nitlapan imbues coffee farmers in Nicaragua, “but entrepreneurs of what will become prospering businesses.” …” (pdf)
  
  
• idem 04-05
  “As night falls, hundred thousands in Hyde Park watch Sting as he intones his first song. He’ll send an S.O.S. to the world, he sings, …” (pdf)
  
  
• “Shopping for a better life”
  article in the magazine “Sustainable Development International” (www.sustdev.org) on Fairtrade in Africa (2005, 4 pages, in English, pdf)
  
  
• interview in EED brochure Poverty Reduction and Fairtrade
  (2007, 2 pages, in German, pdf). The whole brochure: www.eed.de//fix/files/doc/EED_Fairtrade_MDG_070725_deu.pdf