Good progress for Food Covenant

In the food sector, 105 companies are demonstrating their progress in international corporate social responsibility. This is more than a doubling compared to the previous period, according to the annual report 2019 - 2020 of the Food Covenant. Despite the corona crisis, more companies have made efforts to identify and address risks in their chains. The Covenant represents more than 80 percent of the food industry and more than 95 percent of all supermarkets.

The Food Covenant reports on its second reporting year. The monitoring instrument for companies has been expanded to include a simpler variant for SMEs. In the first year, 48 companies shared their progress. In the second year this grew to 105 (of the approximately 600) companies. "We see very clearly that international corporate social responsibility is on the rise, despite the impact that corona has had and continues to have on the covenant. It is on the agenda in both large and smaller companies," says Ewald Wermuth, independent chairman of the Covenant.

The annual monitoring shows that SMEs in the food industry in particular have paid more attention to IMVO over the past year. The proportion of SMEs affiliated to the FNLI that filled in the monitoring instrument has grown from 15 to 53. The FNLI also carried out a qualitative sector analysis (for cocoa, palm oil, soy and coffee), in order to be able to assess which steps can be taken to jointly achieve more improvements. This report was recently presented to the committee for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation of the House of Representatives.

The supermarkets have made progress on each monitoring theme: policy formulation, access to recovery, prioritization of risks, action plans, evaluation and communication. In the spice sector, knowledge and involvement increased significantly in the year under review. There is a great deal of goodwill to get started with CSR risk management.

Click here for the annual food report
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