ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY

SUSTAINABILITY DIMENSIONS

SUSTAINABILITY DEFINED

• Sustainable development has numerous definitions and its principles received universal agreement at the 1992 Earth Summit: the concept of interdependence between nature, people and the economy, as well inter-generational equity, are universally shared.

• 106 countries have established National Sustainable Development Strategies since the Earth Summit in 1992 (re. CSD reporting).

• 120 sustainability frameworks have been developed by experts and businesses, ranging from environmental and social standards to corporate social responsibility and codes of good practices (re. ITC Standards Map).

SUSTAINABILITY IN PRACTICE

• Most initiatives have: predominant environmental criteria; social criteria related mostly to health, safety and employment; economic criteria limited to product quality and minimum wage requirements.

• The expansion of sustainability tools and various claims place a burden on producers and traders and frustrate consumers in the market place: what is sustainability in practice?

• Analyzing all sustainability dimensions as a coherent whole and integrating them into business or development strategies remains a major challenge.

WHY SAFA?

SAFA IS NOT A STANDARD NOR A LABELING TOOL

DIFFERENT LEVELS FOR DIFFERENT USES

SAFA TOOL

SAFA RATING SCHEME

EXAMPLE VISUALIZATION OF THE SAFA PERFORMANCE OF AN ENTERPRISE

SAFA IS NOT A INDEX BUT AN IMPACT ASSESSMENT TOOL

• Enterprises: • performance hotspots • gap analysis with on-going schemes • benchmarking suppliers for sustainable procurement

• Standards community: • impact assessment • best practices learning • gap analysis on all aspects of sustainability

• Governments, investors, policy-makers: • coherent framework for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) • impact assessment • global supply chains requisites

SAFA USAGE

GLOBAL LEARNING ON THRESHOLDS OF SUSTAINABILITY

SAFA STAKEHOLDERS

• Community of practitioners (pilot studies undertaken): • Retail companies with a diverse supply network • Large food companies with an international supply network • Medium-size processing companies (industrialized, emerging and developing) • Small-scale production enterprises focusing on: agricultural food production; non-food

production; aquaculture and capture fisheries; forestry (plantation and native forest); and wild harvest operations

• Food chains of the same commodity, comparing organic and GMO systems.

• Multi-stakeholders organizations (e.g. ISEAL, SAI Platform, TSC)

• Private organizations with public members (e.g. Agros, P4E) • Civil society organizations (e.g. COSA, FAST, IFOAM, RAFI) • Private companies (e.g. Barilla, Cotton Inc., METRO, Migros)

SAFA DEVELOPEMENT WITH & FOR STAKEHOLDERS

WWW.FAO.ORG/NR/SUSTAINABILITY