Sustainable Business Development

 Three Themes

Mainstreaming Sustainable Sourcing

During the last two decades, many standards for sustainable (agricultural) commodities have been defined, often in multi-stakeholder settings. It is time now that retailers, food companies and commodity traders remove the last barriers for their broad implementation so that they become mainstream rather than niche. Two main issues are on the agenda: optimisation of resource planning for sustainable sourcing in the private sector and bringing the governments back into the private sector / NGO driven initiatives. I am working on these issues in several projects.

Land Rights & Food Security in Commodity Standards

The development of large scale agriculture and (plantation) forestry is leading to serious land rights and land access problems in many countries; Palm oil plantations in South East Asia, pulpwood or sugarcane plantations in South America, they are often linked with serious land conflicts and to food security issues as well. These are cross-cutting issues in setting and implementing agricultural commodity standards. I am working on projects to stimulate cooperation and mutual learning between standard initiatives.
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Metals from Responsible Mining and Transparent Supply Chains

Technologies for making mobile phones, wind turbines or electric cars require an increasingly wide spectrum of metals. Unfortunately, many of these metals are linked to violation of human rights, unacceptable working conditions and unacceptable levels of environmental pollution. Supply security, the risk of damaging brand reputation and up-coming legistlation call for stricter control of mining conditions and more transparency of both the metal supply chains and the financial links between companies and governments. In this context, I set up the Roundtable  on Sustainable Platinum Group Metals with Milieukontakt and I am developing additional initiatives on responsible and transparent metal supply chains.