Category: Blog

Over the holiday period I read The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from a Secret World. The author, Peter Wohlleben, a forester from Germany, has become an unlikely media star and his book has become a bestseller, and not just among tree-huggers.

Mr Wohllben draws on recent research to argue that trees not only communicate with each other, they also feel pain and help each other out. He writes,

“Beeches, spruce, and oaks all register pain as soon as some creature starts nibbling on them. When a caterpiller takes a hearty bite out of a leaf, the tissue around the site of the damage changes. In addition, the leaf signal sends out electric signals, just as human tissue does when it is hurt.”

When a giraffe starts eating an African acacia tree, the tree releases a chemical into the air that prompts neighbouring trees to pump a toxic chemical into their leaves to make them unpalatable for the giraffes. When attacked by pests, some trees release a chemical that attracts predators that feed on the pest that is attacking the tree.

In a forest the trees communicate with each other through a “wood-wide-web” of soil fungi through which they can also send sugars that can help sustain sick relatives. One such fungus, in Switzerland, covers almost 120 acres of forest and is an estimated at about one thousand years old.

“Another in Oregon is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends for 2,000 acres, and weighs 660 tons. That makes fungi the largest known living organisms in the world.”

 In a note at the end of the book, forest scientist Dr Suzanne Simard describes how douglas firs can live in synergy with neighbouring birch trees,

“We discovered that the exchange between the two species was dynamic: each took different turns as “mother”, depending on the season…mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations…These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, related, communicating system.”

But what about agricultural crops, plants grown for food or fibres? Peter Wohlleben writes,

“Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground. Isolated by their silence, they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wilderness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.”

 And in the preface to the English edition, Tim Flannery writes,

“Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems…They have lost their ability to communicate and are isolated by their silence.”

All this creates something of a problem. Anyone who watched the wonderful BBC series Blue Planet II last year will know that fish and (particularly) octopus are way more intelligent than we had thought—and way more social. We all knew that that sea mammals were social, but it was a shock to think that other sea animals, including shellfish, can have emotions and feel pain.

Consumers and legislators are already reacting. For example, the Swiss government recently banned boiling live lobsters, arguing that they really do feel pain. Lobsters now have to be “humanely” killed before being cooked.

I know some previously fishing-eating vegetarians who have now given up eating fish—or at least feel guilty when they eat it—after watching Blue Planet II. I am afraid to recommend that they now read The Hidden Life of Trees.

Join the commodity conversation at our seminar in London in June. 

In 2015, ISEAL Alliance conducted a survey of over 100 business leaders as to how they perceived the benefits of environmental and social sustainability certification to their businesses.

In terms of the business value of certification, the interviewees referred most frequently to the final benefits of improved reputation (60%), improved profitability (53%), cost reduction (30%), growth in production (30%), and improved supply security (23%)

The survey found that certified businesses found value in:

• Improved working conditions with positive impacts on worker’s health and livelihood, as well as attention to sustainability in the supply chain
• Reduced conflicts with local communities
• Improved performance of (small-scale) producers and improved short and long-term supply security
• Enhanced sustainable forest and fishery management which contributes to the preservation of the resource and thus long-term supply security.

However, last month Andre de Freitas, the executive director of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) wrote that it is time to recognize that certification has its limits in agriculture.

Earlier this year his organisation came to the conclusion that although they have seen many positive impacts from certification for workers, producers and the environment, it was not the best way to improve the sustainability of most farmers in the world. SAN took the decision to stop working with certification in agriculture.

Mr de Freitas argues that certification has four main interrelated limitations:

1. Certification standards are complex. This means that the gap between producers’ reality and what is required by certification is often too wide. Most farmers in the world lack the technical and financial resources to be able to bridge this gap.
2. Certification can be costly. This pushes certification to higher-end products and developed country markets, which usually can better absorb the increase in the price of raw materials. The author cites coffee as an example: certification can be feasible for the more niche premium products, but not be attractive for the higher volume used in price-sensitive categories. Another example is rice, a staple food in much of the developing world, where certification is virtually nonexistent.
3. The high complexity and cost hinder the ability to scale up and go beyond low double digits in terms of penetration in a given sector. This is a typical low-hanging fruit situation, where, after an initial period of fast growth, every subsequent increase in uptake becomes more difficult than the previous one.
4. SAN found that in their experience certification had been shown to have limited effectiveness to deal with some of the more intractable problems in agriculture, such as child labour, poverty, sexual harassment, sanitation, and others.

The author argues that these limitations mean that certification will work for farms that are already reasonably well-managed, have access to resources, have markets that are able to better value their products, and encounter fairly well-functioning local governance structures. He adds that these conditions are very specific and are not the reality most farmers in the world live in.

How we can reconcile these two opposing views was one of the main topics of debate at last week’s Sustainable Sugarcane Forum in London.

One of the biggest challenges highlighted at the event was in getting consumers to pay a premium for certified products.  If consumers refuse to pay a premium, producers have no choice but to recover the cost of certification through the productivity and reputational gains that ISEAL listed in their report. If producers can’t recover their certification costs, then they actually end up worse off financially.

One of the presenters at the event presented a possible solution to this conundrum: an actively traded credits market where industrial food manufacturers, in their efforts to reach their 2020 sustainability goals, buy credits rather than sugar. Credits already provide some limited extra income to producers and this is likely to expand significantly over the next few years.

Having said all that, Bonsucro’s increasing number of certified mills and our expanding membership suggest that stakeholders do find value in certification. There appears to be a real momentum building.

Not only that, but  in discussions with stakeholders at the event, and at other times over the past year,  both producers and consumers have highlighted to me many of the benefits that the 2015 ISEAL survey also highlighted. Of course producers would consumers like to pay a premium for certified product, but even without one, certification is worth it.

But what about SAN’s other criticisms? Many are valid, but you need to remember that voluntary sustainability standards are just one of the tools in the development toolbox. They cannot do everything. They are not the silver bullet that will kill the vampire twins of human rights abuse and environmental degradation. But they do help to keep the monsters at bay.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen—and welcome!

I recently finished reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. The Guardian newspaper voted it the best non-fiction book of all time. If you haven’t read it already I highly recommend it.

Life has existed on our planet for around four billion years but mass extinctions of flora and fauna have taken place every twenty-six million years or so. There is widespread agreement that a meteor strike caused the fifth mass extinction (of the dinosaurs, amongst others), but geologists disagree as to what caused the others. Perhaps other meteor strikes; perhaps natural climate change.

Pretty much everyone, however, agrees that mankind is the cause of the sixth mass extinction that we are currently living. Geologists call our current era the “Anthropocene”.

The Anthropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, or perhaps even later, with the explosive growth in population that followed World War II. However, the evidence suggests that this process of destruction began one hundred and twenty thousand years ago when Homo Sapiens began its migration out of Africa.

We humans destroy biodiversity in three ways:

1. By eating it
2. By encroaching on—and stealing—its territory
3. By accidently transferring alien species or bacteria

By the time I had finished the book I had realized that this process of extinction has been going on for so long now it seems all but inevitable that it will continue. When it is complete the only animals that will be left on the planet will be the ones that we eat—or the ones that we can marvel or laugh at in zoos or on YouTube.

Volatire once said, “Dans une avalanche, aucun flocon ne se sent jamais responsible” – in an avalanche, so single snowflake feels responsible. Ms Kolbert puts it this way,

“If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an axe, or better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.”

And in case you believe that it doesn’t matter if the world loses a few elephants, tigers, frogs or bats, “the anthropologist Richard Leaky has warned that Homo Sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims”.

Individually we as humans are all pretty good guys. We don’t want to harm our neighbours or our environment. But we do want to do our best for our families. Unfortunately, “doing the best for our families” might entail chopping down a little bit extra forest to plant some more crops to feed our children; shooting the leopard or tiger that is killing our flocks; using more water from the well; using more pesticide or herbicide that we really need—or simply taking our children out to dinner.

Our individual acts don’t have much impact, but taken together they result in the mass destruction of our biodiversity and the poisoning of our planet.

Individually there is little that we can do about it. We can stop eating meat. We can stop buying water in plastic bottles, or coffee in aluminium capsules. We can fill the kettle with only the amount of water that we need to make our tea. We can take a bus or a bike, rather than the car, to work.

All that helps, of course, but together we humans are such a destructive force—and have been for tens of thousands of years—that it is not enough.

But wait a minute. If together we humans are such a powerful destructive force, maybe together we can also be a powerful constructive force. After all, isn’t working together what is supposed to differentiate us from other animals on this planet?

As Charles Darwin once wrote, “in the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”.

Although we have been destroying the planet for the past one hundred and twenty thousand years it is not too late to do something about it if we all work together. And I think we can work together.

But what does working together mean for those of us involved with voluntary sustainability standards – those of us in this room?

The International Trade Centre recently published a report called Social and Environmental Standards – From Fragmentation to Coordination. The authors of the report highlighted 239 voluntary standards operating in 90 agricultural markets, many of them over-lapping.

Cocoa producers in Cote d’Ivoire currently contend with up to ten different sustainability standards. Coffee producers in Honduras have nine standards. Tea producers in China have thirteen. Soy producers in Brazil face 21 voluntary standards.

Different buyers use different standards and, in many cases, their own. This leaves suppliers struggling to comply with several voluntary standards at the same time. The associated audit processes can quickly push up costs, both in time and money.

Competition between standards can also result in what could be called “a race to the bottom”, where producers or buyers may be tempted to choose the most lenient standard.

It is a bit tough to ask a farmer to go through a whole new audit process just because he wants to grow soy this year rather than sugarcane. At the same time, too many standards can confuse consumers and undermine their trust in the whole system.

The report’s authors argued that a reduction in the number of voluntary standards would have many benefits. It would (among others):

• Reduce audit costs, enabling more small-scale producers to become certified.
• Reduce costs for certifying agencies and consumers through economies of scale
• Create brand company clarity in marketing

Perhaps most importantly, a reduction in the number of standards would empower certifying organizations to go beyond certification, to focus more on supporting their stakeholders, and to have more impact where it is needed, at smallholder level. It would allow value chain partners to focus more resources on improvement rather than multi-standard compliance.

This is a case where “less is more”. The voluntary standards scheme sector is ripe for change. But how do we get from where we are now to where we want to go?

The report authors suggest that a first step would be to get everyone talking together, and conferences such as this one have an important role to play.

When we talk together, the various standard-setting organizations need to explore ways of aligning standards, audit procedures and management structures. Benchmarking and mutual recognition of standards would be an important part of that process.

Stacked audits to combine key different elements of standards/company specific audits would reduce the reporting burden.

The idea of companies working together would be unthinkable in the commercial sector; we would quickly be hauled up in front of the competition authorities. However standards agencies are mostly non-for-profit organisations. Our goal is not to make a profit, or to increase our share prices. We are not interested in market share; we are interested in “the greater good”.

Working together, whether in the form of partnerships, shared standards, benchmarking or outright mergers should therefore not only be possible, everyone in this room should welcome it.

Thank you. I wish you a successful conference.