In addition to the long-established guidelines on organic production there has been a surge in other agricultural codes of good practice, national, regional and international standards and voluntary certification schemes which cover a diversity of issues such as food safety, environmental impacts, producers livelihoods and workers health and safety.

Increasingly common are definitions for ‘sustainable management’ for individual agricultural commodities such as oil palm, soybeans, rubber, coffee, cocoa and sugar. Some have been drawn up by concerned groups of purchasers or retailers, others by broad coalitions of stakeholders groups that have brought together producers, environmentalists, workers rights’ experts and others to develop sets of principles and criteria for responsible management.

Many of these require the development of verification arrangements to allow producers to make claims about their fulfilment of the standards, and tracking and separation systems to allow final products to carry labels and claims.

ProForest has extensive experience of helping to define and implement credible and practical requirements for a range of agricultural commodities. We offer the following services:

• Facilitation of  national, regional and international  multi-stakeholder standards and criteria development processes (such as those carried out by commodity roundtables)
• Development of standards and criteria for responsible agricultural commodity development for individual clients, such as retailers and buyers.
• Benchmarking of existing standards and criteria for new scheme development.
• Development of verification systems, and tracking and tracing options for agricultural commodity standards.
• Baseline audits and development of action plans for improvement
  Provision of training and capacity building