Agro-processing companies in Africa are increasingly playing a more active role in supporting upstream players in their supply chain, to remove risk and ensure sustainability.
Large agro-processing companies – often multinationals – rely heavily on small-scale farmers for vital inputs. These companies and their industry bodies are therefore playing a more active role in supporting those upstream players in their supply chain, to remove risk and ensure sustainability.
In addition to addressing risk in the supply chain, the agro-processing sector is responding to growing scrutiny by NGOs and the public of environmental, social and governance (ESG) compliance.
Sustainability standards for agriculture provide a valuable framework to benchmark ESG performance, including the kind of support they provide to small-scale farmers.
In the South African sugar cane industry, for instance, sugar mills often work directly with small-scale farmers to facilitate inputs, management and advice that improve reliability and product quality.
Big data
One of the most valuable tasks they undertake is to collect data from farmers, tracking the volumes of agro-chemicals they consume, what income they derive from their sales, the greenhouse gases they produce, water use and the purity or quality of their product. This allows them to measure whether there are improvements in the operational output from year to year.
This data can then be made available to the farmers in accessible formats. SRK Consulting has worked with two sustainability standard bodies and their respective standards, using their key sustainability indicators to produce dashboards which present farm-based data visually for better interpretation and understanding of the data.
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