Safeguarding human and environmental rights in agricultural supply chains – A risk management toolkit

There is growing agreement that companies at the head of global
agricultural supply chains should take greater responsibility for addressing
the negative effects of their commercial activities at origin, for example on
human and labor rights or environmental degradation. Yet how to do this in a
practical but rigorous way, that generates timely and actionable information
is not simple.
Negative behaviors (i.e. labor violations) are often hidden, and hard to
quantify. Companies have limited capacity for data collection and analysis.
To respond to these challenges, the Alliance, FMO and Mercon Coffee Group
developed a Supply Chain Risk Assessment and Management Toolkit, which
takes a root causes approach to understanding environmental and social
risks in supply chains. We used the toolkit to assess country-level risks for
nine coffee origins.