Bad for assessing impact on producers, communities and the planet. Worse on supporting women and land rights. Bottom of the pile for climate change. Making progress on transparency and workers’ rights, but, overall, must try harder. A lot harder.
We assessed publicly available information on the policies and commitments of the 'Big 10' food companies towards the sourcing of agricultural commodities from developing countries. The Scorecard looks at seven themes, weighing each theme equally. The index tackles some cutting edge issues that will require rigorous debate and dialogue between companies, civil society and industry experts. Find out more...
On land issues, ABF could stand for A Big Fail. It doesn’t officially recognize community land rights or the impact that growing crops for fuel has on food supplies.
Use Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter to nudge your favourite brands.
ABF does run projects to support rural women, but has little data about its female smallholders and no policies in place to support them. Plenty still to do.
ABF recognizes its reliance on small-scale farmers, but now needs to understand how farmers enable whole communities to eat – and what it can do to help this process.
Several ABF companies – including Twinings – now recognize a range of key workers’ rights. But ABF needs to do more to respond to the rights of all workers it touches.
The worst of the Big Ten on climate change, few of ABF’s companies set emissions targets for themselves, and none set them for their suppliers. It does at least acknowledge the issue, though.
Room for improvement, but ABF provides some information about where it sources its raw materials and about the way in which suppliers are audited.
ABF’s attitude to water is a total washout. Zero commitment to reducing water use, and no official recognition of the human right to water.