I recommend Sustainable Sourcing of Agricultural Raw Materials, a Practitioner's Guide, Test Manual for Phase 1 to any agriculture-based company ready to embark on developing a responsible sourcing program or strategy. It is the result of a collaboration of seven organizations that all focus on sustainable development in different and complementary ways. The Guide will be piloted to test is applicability and effectiveness.

I think the Guide provides companies - large and small - with many helpful suggestions and recommended approaches. The Guide frames the process of developing a sustainable sourcing program in the following logical steps:

Developing a strategy

Understanding which raw materials are most prominent or relevant to your business will help you establish appropriate priorities. Your resources will be limited. Strategic planning up front will help ensure that you apply resources to those areas where you will realize the greatest impact, influence, and benefit.

A successful sustainable sourcing strategy must support your core business strategy. The Guide recommends focusing initial efforts in what the authors call the "Smart Zone," where sustainability initiatives provide improved economic, social, and environmental value.  

You must also identify the issues that should be included in your strategy. The Guide provides a good overview of the issues that most stakeholders are concerned with along the supply chain. These include food security, biodiversity, animal welfare, labor conditions, responsible marketing, and food safety.  

Focusing on the value drivers - both for your business and your supply chain partners will prove to be helpful over the long run. You will need support from business partners within your organization as well as from your suppliers and other supply chain actors. These partners will be more likely to support you if they understand and recognize the value to their business or organization. The Guide provides good examples of some typical value drivers, including brand differentiation, improved knowledge and competencies, and access to new markets.  

Establishing a standard

Establishing an appropriate "sustainable raw material" standard warrants research and consideration within the context of the raw materials, sourcing regions, and company culture. An organization can use existing certification schemes or standards or they can be developed from within. You may want to focus on a few primary ingredients or you may instead choose to address "overarching" issues that apply to multiple crops or raw materials. The costs and resources required to implement the standard, the structure and nature of partnerships within your supply chain, and the value created to your buyers and customers should also be considered. 

I particularly like the Guide's suggestion to consider best practices, alignment with leading standards, and industry collaboration. No business will be able to affect significant, scalable change on its own. When you align your requirements with those of your peers, competitors or suppliers, you will be more likely to succeed than if you were to create yet another standard with which suppliers must comply.  

Implementation

Implementation will require support from senior management, business partners, and your suppliers. You will have to understand your supply chain structure and seek input from your suppliers as you develop your sourcing program. These players can help you understand their own priorities as well as otherwise unrecognized challenges, costs, opportunities, and risks.  

The Guide also provides good coverage of other subjects that must be addressed, including: incorporating sustainability issues into supplier requirements, supporting farmers and suppliers in improving operations and products, collaborating with other companies, monitoring impacts and practices, and validating claims. 

Adapting business culture, processes, and structures

Another critical program element to consider is the need to adapt your business's culture, mindset, processes, and systems to support the integration of sustainability into your business. This step will include assessing corporate values, needed skill sets and resources; defining goals, roles and responsibilities; determining how the program should be rolled out; and recognizing and rewarding effective performance. All of these elements must work well together. They must also be supported by senior management and be well understood by managers and directors.  

Communicating to stakeholders

I was pleased to see that the Guide presents the need to communicate your efforts to employees, including those not directly involved in sourcing. Each employee is a potential critic of - or ambassador for - your company. When you help them understand your goals, efforts, challenges, and achievements you will facilitate their shift into the ambassador role.  

The Guide is a valuable resource for food and beverage companies that are exploring (or are in the process of developing) a sustainable sourcing program. I hope the authors will incorporate knowledge and experiences gained during the pilot phase to create a guide for the next evolution of sustainable sourcing programs - one that can help scale up industry and multi-industry efforts.

For quite some time the need to harmonize standards and certification schemes has generated a lot of discussion among the sustainable agriculture community. There are several good reasons for wanting a more harmonized – and hopefully efficient and impactful – approach. Just a few of these include:

· Farmers and producers can focus on one set of criteria for reporting and certification activities, saving valuable time and resources. This is especially important in agriculture where farmers often grow different crops from year to year (e.g. soil-enriching rotations, shifts in market drivers).

· Consistent labor standards would be more effective where farm workers rotate between farms and crops throughout a year.

· Brands and other supply chain partners would only having to manage, measure, and communicate a common set of criteria and impacts.

· Consumers likely would have a better understanding of (and possibly commitment to) certifications that are more consistent in their meaning across different products and standards.

I believe that harmonized standards – that are also simple and flexible – will lead to wider adoption and thus an overall bigger positive impact. With this in mind, I have given thought to the question of how to harmonize standards as I work within and around many different certification systems and agriculture roundtables in various capacities. How effective standards and certification schemes are in achieving their intended objectives is another important topic I have given much thought (and have written about in past newsletters).

I was facilitating a biofuels regulations and voluntary standards workshop recently when such a question was raised. A participant asked presenters from the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “If you were to have a standard focus on one criteria, what would it be?”

I could not miss this opportunity to share my proposed answer to the very question I have asked myself many times. I was quite confident in my response: the optimization of soil health.  The optimization of soil health is one of the most (if not the most) critical conditions we must meet to ensure productive agriculture. Healthy soil will more efficiently provide required nutrients to a plant and improve: water retention, tolerance to limited rainfall (lessening irrigation demand), and a plant’s ability to resist disease and damage by pests. Farmers can be encouraged to optimize soil health through the use of organic fertilizers, no-till operations, and proper crop rotation – all practices that can easily be understood and implemented by most farmers. I believe that such basic and simple practices, with other supporting mechanisms in place (e.g. education opportunities, social support services), many of the impacts sought by standards would be natural outcomes of their focused attention on soil health. Improved soil health should reap a higher yield, resulting in a higher income, sufficient supply to meet increasing demands, and lessening the conversion of biodiverse land for agricultural production. Healthy soils uptake carbon dioxide, capturing and storing greenhouse gases.

Farmers are more likely to succeed if they are asked to focus on one objective that directly aligns with their core business and area of expertise. If harmonized standards require farmers to spread their resources and attention over many issues – most of which are not as directly relevant to their day to day lives or for which they feel they don’t have direct influence (e.g. cultural shifts in gender equality, availability of education) – then their success will be weakened by being pulled in too many directions. Standards and certification bodies and other stakeholders within the agricultural community could measure and communicate the direct or indirect benefits that come out of optimizing soil health. Harmonizing a standard with a focus on soil health would result in benefits for all of the players mentioned at the beginning of this piece – the farmers, the brands, and consumers – improving likelihood of wide scale adoption.

Going back to the question that was posed at the workshop, I think it is interesting to note that both the UNEP and FAO representatives responded to the question with the same response:  land rights.  While I agree that land rights are critical to improving agriculture production and social justice, I propose that requiring soil health standards would contribute to improved respect of land rights, as governments would see the economic and social benefits of improved soil health along with evidence that farmers tend to take better care of the land they own over land that they only lease or otherwise access.

I hope more sincere efforts to harmonize standards and certification schemes around a few meaningful criteria such as soil health are pursued. I am confident that it will have a positive overall impact – which is the simple goal I believe we all seek to achieve.