Jason Potts, Associate Sustainable Commodity Initiative

and IISD

Growing consumer and private sector awareness is leading to rapid growth in the use of voluntary standards and other criteria-based initiatives as tools for ensuring the sustainability of global supply chains.  The growth of voluntary initiatives is stimulating an entire industry devoted to rule development, monitoring and enforcement — and with it, consumer and private sector investment to promote sustainable production and trade. 

The growing attention to sustainable development issues throughout supply chain decision-making is an entirely positive occurrence. However, market-driven initiatives, by their very nature, have little concern, and even disregard, one of the cornerstones of sustainable development—namely, the concept of equity.  Most importantly, the market has very little capacity to ensure that “those most in need" — the primary focus of sustainable development—are indeed the most immediate recipients of benefits under sustainable markets. In fact, actual trends in the growth of markets for sustainable products would suggest that more marginalized sites of production face deeper challenges in entering “sustainable" markets, than they do in entering conventional markets. 

This stands to reason when one considers that voluntary sustainability initiatives are designed to require changes and investments (for more sustainable production)  and that the poorest commodity producers in the world are living well below the international poverty line.  This context points towards the need for a concerted policy effort towards capacity building for sustainable production.  Smaller producers may face higher hurdles in accessing sustainable markets, and yet may offer some of the most long-term sustainable solutions for commodity production. 

As a part of targeted capacity building related to market access, there is also a need for policy makers to ensure that regular and comparable data on the impacts of such initiatives is being gathered to ensure that strategic decisions with respect to the development and implementation of such initiatives can be made in a manner that most effectively serves the objective of sustainable development."