While progress has been made by food and drink producers, buyers and retailers towards sustainability, the scale of transformation required to feed an exploding population and maintain the planet, demands significantly more. In order to succeed, sustainability experts need to agree on a common language that everyone along the food supply chain can understand.
As it becomes more crucial for companies to embed traceability into their supply chains, many different platforms to help them do so have evolved, each using different tools and forms of communication, making consensus elusive and action difficult.
Speaking recently at the Irish Food Board (Bord Bia)’s Global Sustainability Forum, Peter Erik Ywema from the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative, which works to implement secure and thriving agricultural supply chains, says there needs to be agreement on tools used as well as language, so supply chains can “act, not just talk”.
“There have been lots of initiatives over the last 15 years but they are isolated, with a lot of confusion in the markets about what is expected and what the answers to challenges for agricultural farms are,” he said.
“We have means to allow farmers to communicate with customers and customers to understand where their food is coming from but we need to create a language around what the issues at stake really are and agree on them. It’s about water biodiversity and soil health but also about fair income and a lot of economic, social, environmental and rural issues. We need to set a scope of what is relevant and allow supply chain partners to address them in a way that makes sense for them.”
Reconnecting value chains
According to Ywema, the entire supply chain, which can be up to six partners, needs to be reconnected and they need to talk to one another.
“Even big companies like Unilever and Nestle admit they cannot do it alone. Companies faced with non-availability [of raw materials] and price fluctuation as well as criticism from NGOs need to figure out supply. Sustainable practice is happening everywhere but in pockets,” he said.
With as many as 500 different certification standards in Europe alone, understanding food labels can be difficult for even the most sustainably-minded consumer. Ywema proposes that companies with similar requirements use the same tools or at least benchmark their tools with, for example, SAI Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment or the sustainability programme run by Irish Food Board, (Bord Bia), which is the first to operate on a national scale).
Under Irish Food Board’s Origin Green programme, producers develop a sustainability plan with targets in areas such as raw material sourcing, emissions, energy, waste, water, and biodiversity. As well as dispatching independent auditors to assess farms against their targets, it has come up with a simple instrument for measuring success. The carbon navigator, developed in conjunction with Teagasc, which supports science-based innovation in the Irish agri-food sector, is a simple hand-held tool used by auditors to collect data. From carbon footprints to waste management, traceability, biodiversity, fertiliser and nitrogen use, the carbon navigator helps to unify the language of sustainability from the roots up.
“We need to learn from each other, faster”
The need to develop certifications, standards and programmes based on the key impacts of different commodities, is echoed by Jason Clay, senior vice president, food and markets, for the World Wildlife Fund, as well as the importance of sharing best practice.
“We need to bring people who have made market commitments together to start learning from each other, faster. This is a platform and network which can take advantage of 21st century communications systems and share data through open source and other means. Sustainability is not an individual journey.”
According to Clay, we need to produce the same amount of food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000, so creating a platform of consensus is critical, as well as understanding the dangers of business as usual. There is a responsibility on everyone along the food chain to do more with less, and that is a language everyone must learn.
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