How Your Company Can Comply With the German Supply Chain Act

Buying Rainforest Alliance Certified products is a key policy decision that helps a company manage risk and put its sustainability commitments into action. Our 2020 Sustainable Agricultural Standard includes rules for farms and companies, with a requirement that all farm certificate holders and supply chain certificate holders in high-risk areas implement an “assess-and-address” system. These systems incentivize farmers and companies to tackle issues like forced labor, child labor, discrimination, and workplace harassment and violence rather than hide them. Our standard also requires farmers not to use hazardous pesticides and reduce overall pesticide use by implementing Integrated Pest Management approach. Farms and farm groups must also have internal inspection systems and grievance mechanisms in place to monitor all the requirements of the Rainforest Alliance standard.

The Supply Chain Requirements in the Rainforest Alliance 2020 Sustainable Agricultural Standard make it mandatory for supply chain actors to have a “responsible business conduct” policy in place that details plans for preventing, mitigating, and remediating human rights and environmental harms. Oversight and responsibility for the policy and its implementation must be assigned to a member of the senior management team.

One of the key components of effective due diligence is the ability to adequately identify and prioritize risks. All Rainforest Alliance farms, as well as some supply chain certificate holders, must have a risk assessment, mitigation, and monitoring system in place. To help certificate holders with risk analysis, the Rainforest Alliance has already identified risks of certain adverse impacts and built them into our certification system. For example, certified farms must use our child labor and forced labor risk maps. In addition, our basic Risk Assessment Tool, which is a required step for all certified farms, guides farmers on how to assess and mitigate their most urgent human rights and environmental risks. We also require an In-Depth Risk Assessment Tool for farms in higher-risk countries and sectors.

Each Rainforest Alliance certificate holder must create a management plan to mitigate their key social and environmental risks—including those related to their suppliers—and monitor progress on that plan. If, during audits, our authorized certification bodies (whose job is to check for violations of the standard, including those related to human rights) identify non-conformities, certificate holders must correct them or they will lose their certification.

Human rights violations identified by auditors must be remediated using the Rainforest Alliance Remediation Protocol, a rigorous tool aligned with international best practices. The protocol details mandatory steps as well as good practices. Examples of remediation can include ensuring a child returns to school, repayment of unpaid wages, or the dismissal (and/or disciplining) of a perpetrator of workplace harassment. Farms can also use Sustainability Investments from buyers to remediate human rights violations.

Through our certification program, all farms and supply chain actors are required to have a grievance mechanism in place to monitor all of the requirements of the Rainforest Alliance standard, with third-party auditors confirming that such mechanisms are in place and functioning. In the rare instances when farmers or farm workers feel that their grievances have not been appropriately resolved, they can escalate them to the relevant certification body’s grievance mechanism and then to the Rainforest Alliance’s own grievance procedure if necessary. Certification bodies are the third-party auditing firms that check if farms and farm groups meet the requirements of certification.

Our guidance on grievance mechanisms provides support to certificate holders on how to set them up.

Rainforest Alliance certification is working to provide independent, credible data which can be included in a company’s due diligence reporting. In addition to data from audits, our 2020 Sustainable Agricultural Standard sets indicators for farm certificate holders to track and report on over time. For example, the number of cases of child labor, forced labor, discrimination, and workplace violence and harassment that are found by farms’ own self-monitoring systems, as well as cases reported and remediated. For more information, please refer to our full listing of these indicators and our estimated timelines for data reporting.