Miller Magazine Issue: 119 November 2019

45 NEWS MILLER / NOVEMBER 2019 campaigner focused on palm oil at Greenpeace USA. The most information being made available covers palm oil, an ingredient companies use in everything from frozen pizza to soap. For years, environmental or- ganizations have implicated palm oil in the clearing of tropical forests and demanded buyers do more to halt that. Now, they are using company disclosures in their campaigns. Rainforest Action Network used palm-oil- mill lists published by major U.S. and European con- sumer-product companies in a September report that said those firms may be using palm oil produced in an ecologically sensitive wildlife preserve in Indonesia. Slash-and-burn farming practices are a major problem in the country. Mondelez, General Mills and Kellogg Co. are among the food manufacturers now posting lists online of companies that mill the palm oil they buy from tra- ders. Unilever discloses on its website the location of its palm-oil mills and refineries. Nestlé makes available online lists of slaughterhouses it has tapped to get beef, pork and lamb, palm-oil mills and other suppliers. “We wanted to stop this kind of negative perception of the food industry, Nestlé, everybody, that this is a black box that nobody understands, “ says Benjamin Ware, global head of responsible sourcing at Nestlé. By their nature, commodities are undifferentiated products that are meant to be easily aggregated, tra- ded and shipped. For decades, finding detailed infor- mation about supply chains was challenging. Sourcing and transactions were often considered trade secrets, and problems were largely kept out of public view. That it is now possible to know where food makers bought some of their ingredients represents a degree of progress, environmental and human-rights groups say, allowing them to more easily look into com- mercial relationships and whether suppliers are meeting company goals and industry standards. Computing power, including satel- lite mapping, has made it easier to collate in- formation and track conditions in farming areas. “We’re living in an age of data and infor- mation in every aspect of our lives,” says Luiz Amaral, a director fo- cused on commodities and finance for the World Resources Ins- titute, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization focused on the environment. “It isn’t going to be any different in commodity supply chains,” Mr. Amaral says. The shift toward more disclosure in supply chains has its roots in the 1990s, when consumers in wealthier countries started to become more aware of labor con- ditions in developing-world factories producing shoes and apparel. Legislators have since pressed to boost laws governing supply chains. The U.K., California and other places have passed laws requiring companies to disclose information about what they are doing to era- dicate slavery from supply chains. At the same time, more consumers say they care about where their food comes from and how it is made, a trend connected to heightened expectations from shoppers about the healthfulness and environmental impact of what they eat. The ubiquity of digital devices and spread of social media, meanwhile, allows consu- mers to quickly learn more about conditions in agricul- tural regions, such as earlier this year when forest fires in the Amazon region of Brazil drew global attention. “When empowered individuals have the ability to se- arch and learn more information, we were forced to up our game and to understand the complexity and int- ricacies of supply chain in a way we hadn’t before,” says John Church, chief supply-chain officer at General Mills. About 60% of shoppers in the U.S., China and three major European markets said they place a strong emphasis on the source of ingredients when purchasing healthier products, according to a survey conducted last year by the consulting firm AlixPartners. Social and environmental advocates say companies must do more than release data about suppliers. Such groups want makers of well-known consumer produ- cts to use their economic clout as purchasers of vast quantities of agricul- tural products to force change by cutting off farmers and producers who break commit- ments on issues like de- forestation and human rights. “We can tell them they shouldn’t be buying from supplier X, because they’re in violation,” says Mar- cus Colchester, senior policy adviser at British group Forest Peoples Program, which works with indigenous peop- le. “And we can hope they’ll tell supplier X, unless they quickly change, they’ll stop buying from them. It’s that last part that’s not so clear yet.” WALL STREET JOURNAL