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Kraft Executives Get a Close Look at Rainforest Alliance CertificationFebruary 14, 2005
Last month, on a trip to El Salvador, I had the pleasure of showing the CEO and three vice-presidents of Kraft Foods what Rainforest Alliance certification means on the ground. I flew with Kraft CEO Roger Deromedi and three of the company's senior vice presidents - Mark Berlind, Doug Burns and Paul Carothers - from Chicago to El Salvador on their company jet. There we were met by Rainforest Alliance chief of agriculture Chris Wille and Juan Marco Alvarez, the Director of the local Sustainable Agriculture Network member SalvaNATURA. Juan Marco and his colleagues guided us on a day in the field that provided the Kraft executives with an excellent overview of Rainforest Alliance certification. We began at Los Nogales, where fourth-generation coffee farmer Diego Llach explained the many improvements his family made to qualify for certification, including planting 25,000 trees, replacing toxic pesticides with a marigold extract and rebuilding worker housing. We watched coffee being picked in the shade of massive tropical trees and chatted with the
pediatrician who receives a salary from the Llach family and provides workers' children and farm neighbors with free medical care. We spent the afternoon at Las Lajas, a cooperative that is home to nearly 600 families and some 200 bird species. We toured the coop's offices, clinic, daycare center and improved coffee mill. Mill manager Adilson Barrientos explained how the coop has cut water use from 200 gallons per 100 pounds of coffee processed to 35 gallons, and how waste water, which once flowed into a nearby forest, is now treated and used to fertilize the coop's vegetable farm. These are the kind of changes that Rainforest Alliance certification encourages - and they are particularly important in El Salvador, which often suffers from severe water shortages and has seriously polluted waterways.
Our day in the field was followed by a party hosted by one of SalvaNATURA's founders and attended by El Salvador's Vice President, the Minister of Agriculture, the US Ambassador and officials from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). A breakfast meeting and press conference the next day helped communicate the importance of Rainforest Alliance certification to government officials as well as the general public, and placed our relationship with Kraft within the context of our regional USAID project. This quick - but intense - visit strengthened our relationship with Kraft, raised our profile in El Salvador and with USAID and showed all participants what an effective tool certification can be for improving lives and protecting the environment.
Tensie Whelan
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