2 September 2024
Choosing the best actions in a complex world
Executive Director, Global and Europe
We’re all faced with choices. In responsible sourcing and production of agricultural commodities, those choices impact people’s lives, the global climate and the future of nature, both positively and negatively. So how do we decide what action will best drive positive change and help achieve sustainable outcomes? As a mission-driven organisation we seek to advise companies, work with partners and collaborate with governments in ways that deliver impact on the ground. Over the 25 years since Proforest's inception, we’ve had to think about our approach across many different situations, with different impacts and trade-offs. This has made us reflect on how we choose the best approach, which we have distilled into three principles to guide our actions.
First, we have learnt from the last 25 years that cleaning up individual supply chains is not enough. We need sectoral transformation that creates a shift in ‘business as usual’ to drive real change for people and places where we work. So, our first principle is that action should contribute to sectoral transformation, supporting progress towards a ‘business-as-usual’ that is sustainable. This is the only long-term solution.
Large-scale sectoral change is complex and never perfect. Creating islands of excellence through individual projects or segregated supply chains plays an important role in showing what is possible and creating ambition, but equally important are the small incremental steps that demonstrate initial impact and also raise the level for everyone. Not only does this increase engagement by providing producers with first steps that feel achievable, but it also reduces the gap to reach best practice, making continuing progress achievable for more producers and thus creating change at scale.
However, in practice this often means compromising, supporting and recognising small steps, even while acknowledging that there is still a lot more to do.
With any change, particularly the wide-scale change we need to see in commodity production, people will be impacted in different ways. Our second principle is that action should support a just transition, a concept that is gaining traction globally. In agricultural production and sourcing, we interpret this as actively including small-scale and disadvantaged producers, and promoting positive change in high-risk regions, rather than excluding those regions altogether, which affects all producers and communities in the region indiscriminately.
Not only is there a moral imperative for addressing poverty through inclusive transformation, there are longer-term political and social risks from exclusion and disenfranchisement. Building resilient and secure livelihoods for producers within fair supply chains is the best way to guarantee long-term security of supply. We also believe that there is a growing imperative to consider long-term resilience and adaptation so that all producers can not only adapt to the coming challenges of climate change and geopolitics, but also have the chance to thrive.
We know this is going to take work. And we know that organisations and stakeholders have finite resources. That leads to our third principle: that any action must be an effective use of resources.
When we focus on particular issues, it is easy to come up with solutions that are possible but have significant costs in terms of peoples’ time or money. But resources are always finite and often limited, therefore over-investment in one aspect of sustainability can have significant impacts on capacity to work on other aspects. It’s really important to consider what is the most efficient and effective deployment of the resources that are available.
For example, recent regulation and standards development are important drivers of more sustainable production but have sometimes focused heavily on traceability back to every producer, even smallholders. This has significant costs and unless sustainability is being implemented at a smallholder-by-smallholder level it provides limited benefit. In many situations, it is more efficient to focus resources on tracing supply chains to the point where effective action can be taken to address the root causes of poor practice, and then supporting or investing in the actions needed to drive change. That may be a mill, a producers’ association or a jurisdiction. Focusing energy and resources exclusively on traceability and exclusion of non-compliant producers is often neither equitable nor efficient.
It is important to note that sometimes it is simply necessary to mobilise additional resources: where insufficient resources are committed to sustainability the solution is not greater efficiency but more resources.
Achieving the goals of sustainable production and sourcing of agricultural commodities clearly involves many decisions and trade-offs. There’s no silver bullet, and the best combination of actions will depend on the situation – relevance, urgency and resources, for example. But still, in a world of finite resources, we need to make choices and compromises. We need to be honest about that and make it part of our process and our mission to deliver positive impacts. We believe these three principles help us to consider the options and find the right combination of actions in an increasingly complex world.
Proforest Insights are drawn from our 25 years of practical experience in responsible sourcing and production of agricultural and forest commodities. This Insight is part of a series by Proforest’s senior leadership. The full series is available on Proforest’s website https://www.proforest.net/news-events/insights/.