Commodities

Palm Oil

We work with more than 50 companies, helping retailers, manufacturers, traders and refiners to understand their responsible sourcing commitments and implement them throughout their supply chain. We also work directly with palm growers to improve production practices and help them to put environmental and social best practices into action.

Collaboration is essential to achieve impact at scale. That’s why we support a range of multi-stakeholder initiatives, including a longstanding partnership with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Together, we are accelerating improved practice within the palm oil sector by focusing on shared responsibility, review of the Principles and Criteria, guidance on children’s rights and benchmarking standards. 

We coordinate the TFA Africa Palm Oil Initiative, which brings together governments, companies, civil society and community groups to develop a sustainable palm oil sector in Africa. We are involved with the Palm Oil Collaboration Group and its various working groups: Implementation Reporting Framework Active Working Group (IRF AWG), Production and Protection Beyond Concessions (PPBC), Addressing Social Issues Workstream and Independent Verification Working Group.  

Coconut

Coconut is a crop dominated by smallholder production, where yields are low and declining. Small producers are often poorly organised, poorly informed and generate poor returns to support precarious livelihoods. Meanwhile, global demand is growing. New investment in sustainable production is needed to keep pace with this demand. This could bring both new opportunities and new social and environmental risks, neither of which are yet well understood. Solutions are needed to enable small producers to step up and benefit from coconut as a sustainable crop in sustainable landscapes.

At present the industry has no common guidelines to shape and assure sustainability in coconut supply chains. However, there is emerging interest in responsible sourcing and nascent collaboration between supply chain actors through the Sustainable Coconut Charter. Proforest is supportive of coordinated efforts across multiple stakeholders to drive sustainability in the coconut sector. And we are already working on supply chain assessment, engagement and issues around responsible production, looking to bring to bear our experience and expertise from other commodity supply chains on responsible sourcing from smallholders.

Timber

While the majority of our work addresses forest-risk commodities, such as cocoa and palm oil, we also work on forest management, timber legality and forest product supply chains. We support sustainable practices by providing stepwise guidance on responsible forest management to production companies, with the aim of helping them gain certification for schemes like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which enables them to trade with global sustainable markets.  

When it comes to timber, legality is core to our work, which often focuses on two international legal instruments: the EU FLEGT Action Plan and the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR). We advise importers on EUTR and other legal requirements, whilst in producer countries, we help governments and others to establish credible legality assurance systems for FLEGT, EUTR and more. We also provide timber legality verification training for NGOs.