Practitioners’ Guide for the Sustainable Sourcing of Agricultural Raw Materials
Practitioners’ Guide for the Sustainable Sourcing of Agricultural Raw Materials, SAI Platform Back to Resources
Dawn of System Leadership
SFL Champion Peter Senge, co-director Hal Hamilton and FSG director John Kania team up in the lead article, The Dawn of System Leadership, followed by Hal’s article on System Leaders for Sustainable Food. Back to Resources
The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Ae Working Together to Create a Sustainable World.
Peter Senge, long time friend and colleague and author of the The Fifth Discipline and other bestselling books, has come out with a new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Ae Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. The book reveals the revolution already underway in companies around the world creating an alternative…
LINKing Smallholders: A guide on inclusive business models
Agriculture is a source of livelihoods for an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. It provides jobs for 1.3 billion smallholders and landless workers. Thus, it has enormous potential to reduce rural poverty. Yet agribusinesses are usually built around a small number of large-scale suppliers ignoring that 85% of the world’s farms are managed by small-scale…
Costco and CIAT’s Exploration of Guatemalan Green Beans
French-style green beans flow every day from remote farmers in Guatemala to Costco stores throughout North America. They pass through the Cuatro Pinos Cooperative and the Los Angeles Salad Company, who provide technical assistance to farmers and prepare the beans for sale to North American consumers. A Costco executive, through her participation in the Sustainable Food…
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Confronts Los Meses Flacos
Indicators of Poverty and Hunger in Coffee Supply Chains When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters decided to measure the impact of their CSR programs, they asked the Sustainable Food Lab and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) for help. Together, they went into producer communities to identify useful indicators (in partnership with the growers themselves) that would enable…
Business Models that are Inclusive of Small Farmers
Small-scale farmers, who form the bedrock for global agrifood supply, are faced with agrifood markets in an unprecedented state of flux. Domestic markets are undergoing rapid but uneven modernization, and higher value and export markets are increasingly the preserve of larger scale suppliers. Inclusive business models as those which do not leave behind small-…
Commodity Exchanges in Africa
Review of the role of commodity exchanges in supporting smallholder farmer market linkages and income benefits Recently the government of Ethiopia mandated that all of the navy bean trade is to done through the new commodity exchange. But the new business models for sustainable trading relationships team has been working on this crop in Ethiopia…
Think Big. Go Small.
Food and beverage companies are facing a rapidly changing world. Consumers everywhere are growing more knowledgeable and concerned about the ethics of where and how their food and drink are produced. At the same time, development organizations are increasingly seeing the critical role of the private sector in creating sustainable economic opportunities for small…
Formal Value Chains and the Poor
Under What Conditions Are Value Chains Effective Tools for Pro Poor Development? Understanding the benefits, costs, and risks when connecting small scale producers to formal markets is critical to supporting informed decision making by companies, farmers, NGOs, and donors about investing in supply chain opportunities. Key questions include: Who are the rural poor? Under what…