Fostering Equity: Understanding Impacts in Agricultural Trade
We've developed a groundbreaking framework that delves beyond income to assess the broader impacts of agricultural trade on wellbeing and equity. This innovative approach considers environmental and social factors, shedding light on the complexities of soy production - reviewed for example in Dreoni et al. (2022) - and its implications on local and national agendas.
Our flagship output, the 'Sustainable Soybean Policy Toolbox', offers a comprehensive guide for sustainable practices in soy production. In addition, we've scrutinized existing guidance on sustainable agri-food supply chains, emphasizing the need to prioritize social and human rights considerations, producing two papers focusing on mapping social impacts and developing a conceptual framework for understanding the social impacts of agricultural trade.
We also reviewed and analyzed existing sustainable agrifood supply chain business guidance to enable companies to navigate their sustainability journey on environmental and social sustainability themes. In this report on Inclusive Food Systems, we took a look at social and human rights related questions in agrifood supply chains. A forthcoming business brief will delve deeper into the landscape-level action and partnerships, slated for release in September 2024. These reports found that integrating social considerations into nature-related decision-making and multistakeholder collaboration are essential for achieving sustainable food systems and sustainable businesses.
Our social risk register methodology developed for soybean production in Brazil's Cerrado region combines spatial data (maps) on the intensity of soy production with selected indicators of well-being (poverty, inequality, health, education, land conflicts) at a municipal level. The results of a social risk analysis can be used to produce a map of social risks, illustrating the areas where high soy production is encountered with low levels of social welfare. This type of approach could be adopted by companies to identify areas of potential social risk relative to production output within a sourcing country. A simple methodology governments and businesses can apply to understand the biodiversity impacts of food systems
Our experts measured the land-use and greenhouse gas emissions driven footprints of global food systems. Their method is simple and can be applied by decision-makers in governments as well as businesses as part of environmental impact assessments. This allows stakeholders to understand the actual biodiversity footprint of their national food systems and how this contributes to global biodiversity loss. This knowledge is empowering governments to develop policy and businesses to make supply chain changes to transform food systems for the better. In 2011 alone they found that methane emissions were responsible for 70% of the greenhouse-gas driven biodiversity footprint, and, in a few regions, emissions from one year’s food production were associated with global biodiversity loss of 2% or more.