New, revised Fair for Life Programme
The Fair for Life Social Responsibility and FairTrade programme was developed in 2006 by the Swiss Bio-Foundation as a generic fair trade standard and revised in 2010/2011. Fair for Life is applicable for all production situations, product groups and in all countries. The new, revised 2011-version of the programme formalized the applicability of Fair for Life for wild collection operators. The wild collection standard (module 6) can be freely downloaded from the Fair for Life Website.

Fair for Life wild collection module
The wild collection module of Fair for Life offers a comprehensive approach to the certification of all operators who collect plants, lichens, or fungi from the wild. Wild collection comprises all production situations in which the target species is not actively grown within an intensively managed agricultural production system. Wild collected species may occur in natural, semi-natural or extensively managed agricultural ecosystems.
Like for any other production and trade system, Fair for Life certification for wild collection operations is a supply chain certification. This means that not only producers (collection operators) must be certified but also processors (Fair for Life module 2), buyers and brand holders (Fair for Life module 4). For wild collection enterprises, particular focus is on environmental sustainability, because wild collection is a sensitive operation that directly affects natural or semi-natural ecosystems. Hence, regular population and ecosystem survey (inventorying and collection impact monitoring) is of utmost importance for most collection operations and therefore part of the indicators that are being verified during Fair for Life audits. Adequately comprehensive and easy-to-understand collection instructions and collector training are crucial tools to guarantee the sustainability of the collection operation.
The social responsibility criteria that apply are comparable with any other production situation (e.g. absence of exploitative forms of child labour as defined by the ILO conventions; payment of fair wages; contractual relationships etc.). In addition, Intellectual Property Rights agreements and Access and Benefit Sharing systems, which have been developed – on an international scale - specifically for regulating the use of natural resources, are fully covered in the wild collection module of Fair for Life.

Wild collection certification in practice
Owing to the complexity of many wild collection operations, certification is a challenge for both operator and certification agency. Often, production and trade structures need to be adapted to make them comply with Fair for Life certification requirements. Meanwhile, several producers have adapted their production and trade chains accordingly. Certified products range from wild herbs, to nuts and wild coffee. Fair for Life certification is particularly attractive for operators that have a wide range of products, both from wild collection and agricultural production, as both product groups can be audited and certified according to the same programme and carry one fair trade single label. Fair for Life wild collection audits can be carried out in combination e.g. with organic audits to safe costs. Certification according to FairWild is considered as equivalent to Fair for Life wild collection certification.