Sean de Cleene from Yara, Arie van den Brand a former member of the Dutch Parliament, Lucian Peppelenbos from IDH and Britt Lundgren from Stonyfield Farms, discussed their views on the current challenges facing the global food system. The conversation was rich and wide-ranging. Lucian shared his own “painful questions,” which he described as indicators…
C.D. Glen from Rockefeller Foundation and Katarina Kehlmann from Technoserve discussed the opportunities that exist for lead firms to engage in post harvest loss reduction to increase supply, decrease repetitional risk, and deliver livelihood benefits in smallholder supply chains. They also highlighted potential areas of collaboration in sourcing regions. The 3 common agricultural leverage point…
Michele Pisetta from Ferraro, Ann Burkhart from Starbucks, and Susan Forsell from McDonalds discussed opportunities for finding the shared business case for implementing sustainability measures, when partnerships are useful and determining when it is essential to have your own ‘boots on the ground’.
“We can’t talk about climate smart agriculture without talking about resilient communities. If communities can’t deal with shocks, we can’t build up resilient farms.” – Carol Gribnau, HIVOS This session presented the joint work of HIVOS and Soil & More on building a climate smart farming system with 90,000 smallholders in East Africa as a…
Much of the work to improve the performance of commodity sectors with large numbers of smallholders like coffee, tea and cocoa has been anchored in specific supply chains with voluntary standards. Meanwhile, the performance of the sector as a whole – measured in global reputation for quality, farmer share of end value, or capacity to withstand shocks…
Sebastian Michaelis from Tata/Tetley, Jordy van Honk from Sustainable Trade Initiative IDH and Sloane Hamilton from Oxfam GB discussed how the tea sector developed a shared commitment to living wages and the plan of action for reaching a shared target in Malawi. The tea sector including global brands and national producing companies, the Malawi government…
Peter Senge, MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, introduced the concept of system leadership and invited each person to reflect on the gaps between present and desired future in their work. Read The Dawn of System Leadership here …
Nienke Stam from IDH, Simon Lord from Sime Darby, Richard Fox from Finlays, Juliana Lopez from Amaggi and Charlotte Cawthorne from Innocentdiscussed corporate commitments to zero-deforestation or water stewardship and what they are learning about operationalizing those commitments. In particular, as the focus broadens to include not only supply chain but also collaborations among different players…
In the past few years, more than 300 companies – as well as industry groups, governments, and others – have committed to eliminating deforestation linked to the production of key food, beverage, and forest products. While these “deforestation-free” commitments hold great promise to help drive sustainability at unprecedented scale, to translate them into real benefits…
The IDH Sustainable Landscapes Initiative (ISLA) is focused on six landscape level efforts to shift the agricultural system towards sustainable resource management and resiliency. Neinke Stam of IDH introduced three of these cases, with a few of the key points shared below: Richard Fox from Finlays described work around Kenya’s Lake Naivasha where risking population…