We caught up with Ruud Tijssens, president of the European feed manufacturers’ federation (FEFAC), as that group announced the availability of the new benchmarking tool it has formulated together with the International Trade Center (ITC), the joint agency of the UN and the WTO.
As there are now a plethora of different responsible soy programs from soy shippers, traders and farmer associations in the US, Brazil and Argentina, it is critical that such schemes are viable, are transparent, and meet certain standards, said FEFAC.
“In that context, we collaborated with the ITC to develop a filter system that can allow such programs or standards show adherence to the new FEFAC soy sourcing guidelines.
We expect several farmer and trade soy schemes, along with FEFAC member association and commercial standards to be benchmarked in the coming two to three months.
Whether they all show compliance is another thing, but we know from the feedback we have received that a substantial number of European feed manufacturers have pledged to start buying soy promptly from programs deemed to be in accordance with our sourcing guidelines," said Tijssens.
The Federation’s guidelines, which are backed by the EU vegetable oil and protein meal industry (FEDIOL) and produced in consultation with stakeholders in soy growing countries, are a set of base criteria developed to realize a physical transition of responsible soy supplies to Europe.
They cover six major areas: legal compliance, responsible working conditions, environmental responsibility, good agricultural practices, respect for the legal use of land and the protection of community relations.
Road show
Tijssens has just come back from Argentina and Brazil, where he spent a week promoting the new benchmarking tool. He found soy traders and farmers in both countries were only too willing to be given the opportunity to show compliance with the FEFAC sourcing criteria:
“The trader groups, in particular, have been preparing for this development and have done their homework. They are ready to scale up volumes of sustainably produced soy. But, I can’t predict how fast this will be implemented, how quickly we will see sustainably produced material coming into Europe. It depends also on the timing of sowing and the decisions of purchasing managers.”
He said if a soy standard is already in the ITC’s Standards Map database, then the benchmarking process is quite straightforward and can be completed in around two weeks.
But it will be longer, evidently, if the soy scheme is not already registered within that repository of data on voluntary private sector and multi-stakeholder sustainability programs, said the FEFAC president.
No ‘quick fix’
FEFAC said there is no ‘quick fix’ to the creation of a mainstream market supply of responsible soy.
But the trade body argues the soy sourcing guidelines provides it with the possibility to enter directly into discussions with the soy farmers in exporting countries and trading companies.
FEFAC estimates, however, that reaching a ‘critical mass’ supply threshold of 10m tons of responsible soy meeting the requirements of its baseline parameters would allow it to develop the guidelines further and expand on the original parameters.
The soy scheme benchmarking tool can be accessed here.