Sustainability Certification Schemes in the Agricultural and Natural Resource Sectors

Outcomes for Society and the Environment

Melissa Vogt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367729646
• eBook ISBN: 9781351331449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This book provides a balanced critique of a range of international sustainability certification schemes across nine agricultural and natural resource industries.

Certification schemes set standards through intramarket private and multi-stakeholder mechanisms, and while third-party verification is often compulsory, certification schemes are regulated voluntarily rather than legislatively. This volume examines the intricacies of certification schemes and the issues they seek to address and provides the context within which each scheme operates. While a distinction between sustainability certifications and extra-markets or intrabusiness codes of conducts is made, the book also demonstrates how both are often working towards similar sustainability objectives. Each chapter highlights a different sector, including animal welfare, biodiversity, biofuels, coffee, fisheries, flowers, forest management and mining, with the contributions offering interdisciplinary perspectives and utilising a wide range of methodologies. The realities, achievements and challenges faced by varying certification schemes are discussed, identifying common outcomes and findings and concluding with recommendations for future practice and research.

The book is aimed at advanced students, researchers and professionals in agribusiness, natural resource economics, sustainability assessment and corporate social responsibility.

1 Sustainability certifications

Changes over time and their unique position of influence

Melissa Vogt

Introduction

‘Sustainable’ business practices have challenged a legacy of economic and production priority for three or so decades. Balancing industry requirements with social and environmental protection is intricate and interests within and between stakeholder groups can differ significantly. International and local trade dynamics over time and across geographic regions, stakeholders and industries complicate how sustainable trade and business practices can be achieved with various sustainability mechanisms and approaches used. Market mechanisms work internally, or provide direct external guidance and support to business. Extra-market efforts via policy and legislation, and non-governmental effort guide sustainable business practice. All or most mechanisms rely on a pivotal verification need which requires accurate and specific yet encompassing findings regarding compliance and associated outcomes. There is variable evidence of associated outcomes and understandings of benefit across industries, according to the mechanism for change used and whether coordinated complementarity between mechanisms is encouraged.

Sustainability in business practices can still therefore be understood as a newly progressing movement in terms of actual reach of improvement across stakeholders, across and within industries and according to the various sustainability mechanisms. It is possible that what ‘doing this well’ means is yet to be appropriately or comprehensively known by all stakeholders given the ranging dynamics to be addressed and managed. The legacy of economic and production priority might require more time to significantly shift all stakeholders, and availability of and interest in sustainably extracted, produced and sourced natural resources must also increase. Gradual advance and improvement in these efforts and in understanding outcomes is evident. With ongoing experience, improved research and increased ambition is expected.

Sustainability certifications have a unique role among the various mechanisms used. They work according to the premise that increased market demand for sustainable products leads to improvement in sustainable trade practices, and rely on and work with several stakeholders and actors directly involved in production, and in international sourcing and trade practices. They deal with varying business types and sizes, along international and national sourcing chains, and have an informal interchange with policy and law due to their distinctive role of independent sustainability standard development, introduction and compulsory verification. Their position of influence is therefore unique and relevant across sectors and countries, with significant potential to encourage consistency across involved stakeholders, also referred to as a form of transnational governance (Gulbrandsen 2010). Yet, they also often rely on market demand for maintained momentum, presenting a label on products at point of sale to lead preferential purchases, with potential to set up forms of competition between the different labels within the same industry and possible implication of market-based preferences for producer and sourcing countries. Where consumers or a company believe an approach is positive for sustainability they may be more inclined to demand and purchase certified labelled products (Singh and Pandey 2012).

Inconsistent market demand, yet a need to have certified natural resources available, means that working toward sustainable sourcing and trade practice with sustainability certifications may not follow a linear process. There are some interesting dynamics to consider in seeking improvement and increased ambition. For example, (1) an increase in popularity and sales can contribute to improvement in outcomes instead of expecting such improvements before availability on the market. A significant grey area of stating associated outcomes, distinct from greenwashing, which may already be proven or simply intentionally misleading (Dahl 2010; Schmuck et al. 2018), emerges. (2) Producer or extraction practices might be certified prior to secured market access and demand. The benefit to the environment of certifying hectares or extracted natural resources prior to securing market access, influenced by the calibre of standards, approach to implementation and verification, and associated outcomes, can be recognised. The societal outcomes would, however, need to be substantiated.

While the flexibility allowed for consumer preference has arguably been a crucial element for increases in certified markets and sustainability practices, market-based preference provisions a more distanced, subjective and unpredictable possible influence on associated outcomes. Where consumer or business preference subsequently determines other stakeholder preferences for sustainability certifications or certified produce, verified versus subjectively preferred labels is a necessary consideration. Verification requires not only an effective monitoring of compliance. It must also consider associated outcomes from compliance, and, as associated to standard criteria, approaches to implementation and to verifying practices through a sourcing chain. Certification must also be according to the type or definition of sustainability sought, providing additional variance in how outcomes are considered, measured and explained. An outcome is any identifiable benefit or disadvantage associated with a sustainability certification. Identifiable refers not only to tangible observations but to an understanding of what was involved to achieve any outcome, and the associated outcomes of the involved process.

The chapters in this book seek to provide an example of the range of disciplinary, industry and certification-specific considerations that are relevant for determining societal and environmental outcomes resulting from sustainability certifications. Expectations for comprehensive studies and practices according to required specificity can be better set, and ideas for combining or coordinating the consideration of several specific disciplinary studies, as well as studies and efforts across certification and/or industry encouraged.

To introduce the book, this chapter provides background to the influence of trade on societal and environmental outcomes resulting from production and trade. Two examples are provided: the green revolution and general political economic dynamics by country. A foundational understanding of why intramarket and sustainability efforts exist, and how they attempt to resolve a somewhat negative legacy of production and trade influence on the environment and society is explained. Codes of conduct dependent on ideas of Corporate Social Responsibility and Accountability (CSR and CSA) are explained, relevant to corporations and smaller international and local business, and then sustainability certifications as a complementary mechanism. A history of sustainability certifications provides more specific foundational understanding of origins and subsequent development, and an idea of the range of labels and certifications that currently operate are listed. Further information is provided for the certifications, labels and industries discussed in this book and the chapters are summarised as an introduction to content.

Trade: social and environmental concern

Trade-related environmental concerns include deforestation and land degradation caused by agricultural, tree plantation or mining expansion and natural resource extraction (Ceddia et al. 2014) and processing (Kobayashi et al. 2014). Societal concerns can be associated with or isolated from environmental outcomes. Pollution and contamination resulting from farming, extraction, processing and manufacturing are significant land, air and water-based environmental concerns (Cottrell et al. 2018; Chen et al. 2018) with influence on and subsequent social concern for health and worker care at individual, community and national levels (Agardy 2000; Moss 2008; Downey et al. 2010; Hamilton et al. 2016; Cusack et al. 2017; Carvalho 2017; Schrecker et al. 2018; Zhang et al. 2018). Recognising the negative influence of production for trade purposes has taken time to develop, relying on improved understanding according to subsequent outcomes for society and environment. Not only is improved understanding required, the responsible parties must also be willing to listen and respond. In some cases new and more sustainable industries have developed over time. They can, however, result in similar environmental damage – biofuels is an example.

Developing detailed understanding of negative influence alongside effective and realistic compromises with trade needs is required. Two considerations will be addressed here: (1) the green revolution and fluctuations in supply and demand for other natural resources as influential to production and extraction approaches, and environment and society. These provide an example of how trade can promote or compromise positive environmental and societal outcomes and present an idea of the intricacy of comprehending a positive or negative outcome for these situations. (2) The political economy of each country as influential to systemised approaches and to how market-based influences can overwhelm government priorities.

Systemised and market-based approaches to intensive production and
extraction: influence on environment and society

The green revolution, as a systemised approach to intensive production, substantially influenced not only agricultural practice but also economic and societal distributions and balance resulting from international trade from developing countries between the 1950s and 1970s (Wolf 1986). The advantages and disadvantages of the green revolution did eventually vary with contrary findings according to economic outcomes, and societal and environmental implications, including exacerbating existing inequalities. In particular cases hybrid crop varieties reduced need for synthetic inputs and resulted in economic benefits for farmers and households (Ali and Abdulai 2010; Hossain et al. 2013). For farmers, however, cost reductions and productivity were only beneficial where price paid allowed a significant margin (Evenson and Gollin 2003). While green revolution techniques are attributed to reduced forest or natural habitat conversion for agricultural production (Stevenson et al. 2013), the outcome was not uniform, with several regions and countries continuing to experience the significant conversion of forest to agricultural land use (Parayil and Tong 1998; Geist and Lambin 2002). High crop yield varieties also required intensive industrial agricultural techniques (Hoisington et al. 1999) and harmful chemical inputs (Pimentel 1996), with influence on the production system and surrounding environments (Horrigan et al. 2002; Bellamy 2010; Vogt 2011, 2017, 2018).

Green revolution agricultural systems did degrade the environment, over use natural resources and result in significant social implications (Pingali and Rosegrant 1994; Singh 2000; Horrigan et al. 2002; Gruere and Sengupta 2011; Shiva 2016) including exacerbated social inequalities (Freebairn 1995). Some macro-level studies suggest an increase in food supply in developing countries (Pingali 2012); however, access across region or across societal category is not specified and was actually variable. Non-food crops, coffee, sugar, cotton, spices, tea, for example, did dominate food crops in some regions (Paige 1997; Higman 2000; Parayil 2003; Adams and Ghaly 2007), leaving significant reliance on imported food. The question of heterogeneous food availability and nutritional content also requires additional qualification for findings that food supply increased. Intensive homogenous crop density for productivity requires a significant amount of discretion and care. Where negative outcomes result they can be significant and cannot be compensated by positive outcomes in other regions. A new wave of ‘green revolution’ has been observed more recently (Cartel et al. 2006; Pingali 2012). Kerr (2012) has argued that without addressing social inequality and environmental concerns, this new wave, despite integrating a consideration of environment and society, will, just like the previous, result in increased inequality, environmental degradation and malnutrition for the rural poor.

There was no such ‘green revolution’ for extractive industries such as logging, mining or fisheries. There has, however, been a significant lack of effective regulation and stan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Sustainability certifications: changes over time and their unique position of influence
• Part I Cultural considerations associated with sustainability certifications
• Part II Evaluating biodiversity outcomes
• Part III Standard development and verification-based examples and considerations
• Part IV Industry or certification specific reviews, evaluations and recommendations
• Part V Industry and country specific primary research, evaluation and recommendations
• Part VI Summarising outcomes for society and the environment
• Index