For nearly four decades, the Rainforest Alliance has worked alongside farm and forest communities to demonstrate that commodities can be grown and harvested in ways that treat people and nature with care. That work begins on the farm and travels a long road—distributor to importer to brand to retailer—before it becomes the confidence a consumer feels holding a certified product. That trust is a key mechanism through which we push markets to move toward sustainability. And in our world, trust is only as strong as the evidence behind it.
Earning that trust has always required rigorous, independent verification. Delivering it at the scale the world needs has always required us to drive down costs so that more farmers can access our system, more supply chains can be held to account, and the benefits of sustainability can extend further. The tension between evidence, trust, and cost needs continuous innovation and fine-tuning. AI may be the most significant opportunity we have ever had to resolve it.
Or it may become the most significant risk if we get it wrong. At the Rainforest Alliance, credibility is our currency, and we will be intentional in how we approach this moment. Used well, we believe AI can lower the cost of verification, surface patterns invisible at human scale, and bring better evidence to more farmers and more supply chains. But we recognize that AI also introduces a new crisis of trust. When AI shapes an audit, a certification decision, or a supply chain risk signal, accountability for that action must be unambiguous—and it must be human.
The farming and Indigenous communities at the heart of our mission are not waiting for this conversation to reach them. For many, the extraction of their data and knowledge for others’ benefit has already begun. A global conversation about the ethics of AI is underway—in farming communities, in civil society, government, and in international institutions. Across that conversation, consensus is converging around four principles: that AI must serve human dignity, not undermine it; that data and AI power must not concentrate in too few hands; that human oversight of consequential decisions is non-negotiable; and that those most affected by AI must have a genuine voice in how it is governed.
We believe the role of independent, mission-driven organizations has never been more important in ensuring these principles are realized. In an era when AI can generate confident outputs at speed, the need for credible, objective, and human-accountable verification only grows. Since its founding, the Rainforest Alliance has worked to hold supply chains accountable to farmers, workers, and the natural ecosystems that sustain them. We intend to bring that same commitment to how AI takes root in the systems we work within.
Our commitments are as follows:
Trust and human oversight. AI may support human judgment at the Rainforest Alliance, but it will never replace it. Every farmer must be able to understand, challenge, and appeal any decision that affects them. We already use AI-powered tools, including remote sensing and deforestation risk mapping, and we will continue to expand these capabilities, always with human accountability at the center.
Data sovereignty. Data that flows through our systems must serve the people who generated it, and we must be transparent about how it is used, including in accountability and compliance decisions. We are committed to informed consent, local ownership, and the right of every farming community to understand and determine how their knowledge and data are used. Our shift toward leaner, more targeted data collection—fewer data points, greater quality and clearer purpose—reflects this principle in practice.
Accountability over concentration. We will not use AI in ways that concentrate gains among the already powerful, obscure accountability, or displace human relationships at the heart of our certification standards. We will use our position as a global standard-setter to advocate for AI governance that keeps power accountable and oversight public, consistent with commitments being made by peer organizations and the broader responsible AI movement.
Environmental integrity. We aim to hold AI infrastructure—data centers, energy systems, resource extraction—to the same environmental accountability we demand across every supply chain we certify. The ecological cost of AI is real, and it falls disproportionately on the landscapes and communities our work is meant to protect. We will bring our expertise in sustainable agriculture and forestry to inform solutions to emerging AI impacts and advocate for the farm and forest communities who stand to be affected most.
Collective action. No organization can get this right alone. We will engage across sectors—governments, companies, civil society, and the communities we serve—to help shape AI governance that is equitable, transparent, and people-centered. Building alliances for the common good is what we do. Where the path forward is uncertain, we will build the coalitions needed to find it.
AI is moving faster than any organization’s ability to fully anticipate its consequences. We expect our thinking to evolve as the technology does, as its impacts on farming communities become clearer, and as the global conversation around it matures. But there’s one thing we know for sure. For nearly forty years, every decision we’ve made has been guided by our commitment to the farmers, the forests, and the people who trust us to tell the truth about both. AI does not change those commitments. It raises the stakes for honoring them.
