Our Company
Sustainable Agriculture -
What We Are Doing
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We have a responsibility to address both the social and environmental impacts of our supply chain. Our Supplier Guiding Principles articulate our core values and the expectations we have of our direct suppliers. The Guiding Principles emphasize the importance of responsible environmental practices.
Our procurement organization and our bottling partners are working to incorporate sustainability criteria into our long-term purchasing plans. This is an important step in our ongoing efforts to support innovations that will help reduce the environmental impacts of our supply chain.
To help promote sustainable agriculture throughout our industry, we are also working with suppliers, NGOs, other businesses and governments from around the world to help shape strategies across our supply chain and advance sustainable agriculture in concrete ways:
- In 2004, prompted by public concerns regarding child labor used during the sugar cane harvest in El Salvador, we began working with the International Labour Organization's International Programme on the Elimination of Chile Labour (ILO IPEC) and other stakeholders to support local efforts to end child labor in the sugarcane industry. The aim of the initiative was to drive social improvements to help children remain in school or, if circumstances required it, to ensure that their working conditions were safe and that they earned an income on par with ILO convention standards. The ILO IPEC has since reported an 80 percent reduction in child labor among the children who were targeted in this program. We continue to work with our divisions in Latin America, our suppliers, bottlers and others to apply what we have learned to address child labor in other countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.
- In 2005, we joined the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI), a food industry group that engages stakeholders along the agricultural supply chain to share knowledge and support the development and implementation of internationally accepted standards for sustainable agriculture. We participate in the SAI Platform Working Group on Fruits, which focuses on developing sustainable fruit production practices and improving environment and socio-economic conditions in fruit-growing communities.
- To ensure a consistent approach on workplace and human rights worldwide, the
Coca-Cola Company published a Workplace Rights Policy and Human Rights Statement in early 2007. The Policy contains the Company's principles on freedom of association, forced labor, child labor, discrimination, work hours and wages, safe and healthy workplaces, workplace security and community and stakeholder engagement. We have held multiple training workshops on the Policy and Statement in every geographic operating unit, including cross-functional representation from the Company and its largest bottling partners.
- We are working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to identify opportunities to reduce water use in our supply chain, starting with sugarcane
(beginning in 2007), and expanding to oranges and corn (beginning in 2010). WWF and
Coca-Cola have been participating in an initiative with the Better Sugarcane Initiative (BSI), a multi-stakeholder collaboration whose mission is to promote improvements in the key environmental and social impacts of sugarcane production and primary processing. Working with our agricultural partners, we will set measurable targets for improving our water use. Our work on oranges and corn is in its initial stages. Like sugarcane, the production of oranges and corn can have large implications for water use, and considerable impacts on freshwater ecosystems. The partnership will engage producers to promote better management practices that measurably reduce impacts, and to design procurement strategies that help us to further reduce the environmental impacts of our supply chain.
- Together with Business for Social Responsibility, we initiated The Agricultural Water Initiative to 1) develop supply chain tools that enable corporations to assess, monitor and improve water management strategies in their respective supply chains; 2) create sustainable water management tools for producers; and 3) create water management indicators and an assessment tool that can be a widely-applicable industry standard.