As some readers will recall, we held a conference on deforestation last week in London.
Here’s a few thoughts that came out of it as a result. Thanks to Richard Donovan from the Rainforest Alliance for nuancing some of this.
- An incredible amount of progress has been made since 2010.
- There are three kinds of companies in the space: Those who have yet to do anything beyond the law, those who belong to RSPO only, and a third, much smaller group who are going way beyond RSPO and other standards to drive innovation.
- Some companies are rushing out announcement with no idea of how they will achieve them or how to handle transparency, how they will actually meet commitments, etc.
- Others have developed in-depth partnerships with NGOs, but are not finding implementation at all easy. The leaders are going into it knowing it won’t be.
- Conservative companies struggle with this due to the age old attitude of “we only talk about what we know how to do”.
- Social issues are becoming far more obvious barriers to change than in the past.
- Governance and accountability, along with social issues, is now top of the agenda.
- Industry groups, such as the Consumer Goods Forum and the World Economic Forum, are starting to push for more B2B collaboration beyond just RSPO-style compliance.
- Increasingly, it’s not just about confusing terminology such as HCV and HCS, but about “landscape management” and “smallholder engagement”.
- The Tropical Forest Alliance represents a significant opportunity for companies to engage governments and NGOs on better governance issues. The TFA 2020 initiative has company, NGO & government partners.
- The “China and India will buy all the bad wood products/palm oil” argument is disputed by some working with the suppliers at source. But others see it as a key problem yet to be substantively addressed.
- Certification, whilst limited in its ability to drive systemic change, is part of the mix, but by no means the whole story.
- Legal enforcement of recently enacted laws in the EU and USA have a very long way to go.
- Enforcement is extremely complicated given the difficulty of proving product provenance.
- The dynamics around procurement policies and deforestation have engendered both dialogue and action in ways we could not have predicted. This has sharpened the focus on deforestation as a part of sustainable or responsible purchasing programs, but the challenges for such efforts are how to ensure systemic platforms that ensure continuity, and how to handle transparency.