{"id":13075,"date":"2020-11-28T12:36:32","date_gmt":"2020-11-28T03:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/?p=13075"},"modified":"2020-11-28T12:36:32","modified_gmt":"2020-11-28T03:36:32","slug":"uneps-crop-certification-opens-global-green-markets-for-farmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/uneps-crop-certification-opens-global-green-markets-for-farmers\/","title":{"rendered":"UNEP\u2019s Crop Certification Opens Global Green Markets for Farmers"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Delhi (ABC Live India): UNEP\u2019s Crop Certification: Over the last 30 years, more and more tea, coffee, and cocoa\u00a0<\/strong>farmers have embraced climate-smart and sustainable practices by adopting \u201ccertification standards\u201d that help to maintain soil quality, increase productivity and reduce costs. The standards also assure buyers of agricultural commodities that the products in their supply chains are environmentally sustainable.<\/p>\n

In July 2020, a milestone was reached when United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) partner,\u00a0the Rainforest Alliance<\/a>,<\/u>\u00a0published its new unified standard (certification programme) for production systems that conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. The standard applies to over 5 million hectares of tropical farmland, impacting the livelihoods of over 2 million farming families.<\/p>\n

\u201cCertifications like Rainforest Alliance have played an important role in driving sustainable supply chains at both the production and consumption end,\u201d says Christopher Stewart, Global Head of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Olam International. \u201cWe have partnered with the Rainforest Alliance for many years and highly valued their sustainability expertise and implementation skills to help us advance our farmer programmes. A stamp-like Rainforest Alliance can motivate consumers to buy sustainably produced products and support farmers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The numbers prove that farmers also find benefit in getting certified. Data from 2019 indicates that more than\u00a0209,000<\/a> farmers participated in the Rainforest Alliance certification scheme in C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, Ecuador, and Ghana, producing more than 200,000 tonnes of cocoa, enough to make\u00a013 million 100g chocolate bars<\/a>\u00a0per day.<\/p>\n

In the same year, companies bought enough Rainforest Alliance certified tea to produce\u00a0330 million cups of tea every day<\/a>, with certified production involving\u00a0936,000 tea farmers and 734,000 workers<\/a>. The top producing countries were India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka. Data on 2020 will be published in March-April 2021.<\/p>\n

In Ghana, where cocoa is the nation\u2019s main export,\u00a0bringing in over $3 billion in 2018<\/a>, UNEP\u00a0and the Rainforest Alliance joined forces with\u00a0Olam<\/a>\u00a0to enable uptake of the Rainforest Alliance\u2019s sustainable agriculture certification scheme in the Bia-Juabeso region.<\/p>\n

Taking a\u00a0landscape approach<\/a>, which seeks to balance competing land-use demands in a way that is best for human wellbeing and the environment, the project was one of the first initiatives in Ghana to conduct farm mapping and registration of trees on farmland, mobilizing 2,800 farmers in 34 agricultural communities to conserve the local environment and ecosystem services on which future\u00a0cocoa<\/a>\u00a0productivity depends.<\/p>\n

The approach has since been replicated across three different landscapes in Ghana, in collaboration with Olam, funded through the United Kingdom Government\u2019s Partnership for Forests, and most recently a new partnership with the European Union.<\/p>\n

UNEP and the Rainforest Alliance, with backing from the\u00a0Global Environment Facility<\/a>,<\/u>\u00a0have been supporting farmers from Ghana to Vietnam to take advantage of certification schemes \u2013 building rural prosperity, while also developing green supply chains and delivering healthy food and other agricultural products to local communities.<\/p>\n

Greening the tea industry<\/strong><\/p>\n

In China, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam the partnership worked with tea growers to reduce the use of agrochemicals for weed control, reducing costs to farmers, and improving soil health.<\/p>\n

The project taught smallholder tea farmers how to distinguish harmful weeds from harmless ones that can be left in the ground. This helps protect from erosion, improves soil organic content through mulching (a powerful source of plant nutrition as well as a carbon storage agent), and significantly improves soil moisture \u2013 all key for crop production. With fewer weeds to extract, farmers can remove harmful species manually, avoiding poisonous herbicides, and reducing the costs of maintaining a healthy crop.<\/p>\n

The future of certification<\/strong><\/p>\n

Building on the successes of these initiatives, the Rainforest Alliance rolled out its enhanced\u00a0Certification Programme<\/a>\u00a0in July 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter two years of far-reaching consultation with farmers, companies, non-government organizations, governments, and researchers \u2013 with input from more than a 1,000 people in nearly 50 countries \u2013 we have raised our ambitions,\u201d says Rainforest Alliance\u2019s Director for Landscapes and Communities, Edward Millard.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means strengthened requirements for farms and companies, better monitoring and assurance systems, advanced digital innovations, and, at the heart of it all, a vision of sustainability as a shared journey of continuous improvement,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Farms will work towards increasing compliance with the standard while learning new techniques based on using the services that nature provides.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe great thing about this new scheme is that it is much more doable for farmers than previous schemes. It\u2019s also at the core of a new Global Environment Facility-funded sustainable agriculture landscapes project in India, expected to start in 2021,\u201d says UNEP biodiversity and land management expert Max Zieren.<\/p>\n

Also, Read the related ABC Research Reports<\/p>\n

FAO Hails India\u2019s e-NAM Platform for Agriculture Marketing<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n

UNEP\u2019s Crop Certification\u00a0 UNEP\u2019s Crop Certification\u00a0 UNEP\u2019s Crop Certification<\/p>\n

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New Delhi (ABC Live India): UNEP\u2019s Crop Certification: Over the last 30 years, more and more tea, coffee, and cocoa\u00a0farmers have embraced climate-smart and sustainable practices by adopting \u201ccertification standards\u201d that help to maintain soil quality, increase productivity and reduce costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13503,"featured_media":13076,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5799,5,4658],"tags":[6529,6528,6527,6526],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13075"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13503"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13077,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13075\/revisions\/13077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abclive.in\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}