These countries are Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. It formalised in 1990. The Association is based in the Netherlands. It is a member of the World Fair Trade Organisation (WFTO).
The EFTA aims to support its member organisations in their work and facilitates cooperation and coordination among affiliates in different thematic areas. It, therefore, facilitates exchange of information and networking, creates conditions for labour division and identifies and develops joint projects. It does so by organising member meetings on different subjects ranging from technical aspects of sustainable food production, storage and transport to logistics and other management aspects of fair-trade value chains and it circulates relevant information among the member organisations.
In its impact reports, the EFTA shows various examples of how the umbrella organisation facilitates cooperation and coordination among its members. One such example is shown in the creation of the Fair-Trade Advocacy Office (FTAO). The EFTA, together with FLO, IFAT and NEWS! (Network of European World Shops) started to meet in 1998 and were known by their acronym FINE. The aim of FINE is enabling their networks to cooperate on important areas of work, such as advocacy and campaigning. Out of these meetings, the joint Fair Trade Advocacy Office was created in April 2004 that replaced the EFTA Advocacy Office which had been operating in Brussels since 1995.
Also, the EFTA Information and Assessment System, based on the WFTO Fair Trade Principles, is an example of cooperation among the member organisations. In this system, the EFTA maintains a database of all fair-trade partners among its membership, in order to support EFTA member organisations in their relationships with partners. With this database the EFTA can for instance give early warnings in case of problems within certain value chains or service providers or EFTA can check compliance with fair-trade standards within their member organisations and their partner networks. This EFTA database also contains Information Forms and Assessment Reports.
Sources:
European Fair-Trade Association (2006), Annual Report 2006 https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/22160616/annual-report-2006-european-fair-trade-association
https://wfto.com/who-we-are#search-wfto-members
EFTA (2013) Joining Fair Trade Forces http://www.european-fair-trade-association.org/efta/Doc/What.pdf