The following profiles are examples of some of the companies and individuals honored this year by the Rainforest Alliance. They are exemplars of commercial operations that are re-tooling to meet Rainforest Alliance and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) seals of approval, helping conserve biodiversity and provide sustainable livelihoods for their workers.
Kraft Foods & Sustainable Coffee
For four generations, Diego Llach’s family has farmed coffee amidst the rainforest on the steep and shaded slopes of El Salvador’s volcanoes. They have nine farms in the “Los Nagales” group, scattered across these mountains. When Kraft Foods CEO Roger Deromedi visited one of his farms, Llach told him that the price Kraft paid for quality Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee allowed him to invest in improvements such as better housing for workers and a doctor to care for their children.
Certified farms that meet the Rainforest Alliance’s rigorous standards are the next best thing to rainforest for wildlife. They protect watersheds, buffer parks and create biological corridors. Farmer and workers benefit because coffees certified as sustainable command a higher price in the market and farmers save money from improving the way they farm, allowing a better standard of living. That is why Kraft’s unprecedented commitment to buying sustainably produced coffee is so important.
Kraft’s Commitment to Conservation
In 2004, Kraft purchased six million pounds of coffee from certified farms in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico. This year, the amount will double, increasing thereafter. It may be a small percentage of Kraft’s coffee, but it is a significant proportion of the total production of Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee and represents an important expansion of the global market for sustainable coffees.
Kraft is also partnering with the Rainforest Alliance to train and provide assistance for coffee farmers to help them reach certification standards. The company made the single largest contribution to the development of the Sustainable Agriculture Network, the coalition of national NGOs in Latin America that is coordinated by the Rainforest Alliance and that guides farmers along the path toward sustainability.
Said Tensie Whelan, Rainforest Alliance executive directory, “Given Kraft’s global prominence in coffee, this partnership is the first indisputable evidence that the concept of sustainability, once limited to niche markets, is entering the mainstream.” Beyond its own program, Kraft is supporting efforts of the coffee industry to adopt industry-wide standards of sustainability.
Growing and harvesting certified coffee for Kraft in 2003 employed nearly 10,000 families (about 50,000 people), on 28,500 acres (11,500 hectares) of farmland in Central and South America. Diego Llach, for example, has planted 25,000 trees, replaced toxic pesticides with a marigold extract and rebuilt worker housing.
Kraft is one of the world’s leading coffee companies and the largest food company in North America. The company is blending Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee into many popular brands in Western Europe, including Maxwell House and Gevalia. A Kenco brand in the UK and a new All Life brand in the U.S., will be sold in foodservice settings, such as hotels, cafeterias and restaurants. Kraft plans to launch certified coffees in the retail market this year.
By bringing sustainable coffee to mainstream brands, Kraft is helping to grow overall demand and expand the global market for sustainably produced coffee, benefiting an ever increasing number of farm communities.
Tembec and Sustainable Forestry
Based in Canada, Tembec is an integrated forest products company with 55 manufacturing units in Canada, France, the US and Chile involved in the production of wood products, market pulp and papers. It manages 32 million acres of Canadian forest, and is an industry leader in obtaining Rainforest Alliance/SmartWood/FSC certification.
Tembec intends to obtain certification for all 32 million acres of Canadian forest under its management by the end of 2005, going well beyond regulatory requirements to protect sensitive spaces, respect local communities and indigenous peoples and promote sustainable forestry practices.
The Situation
According to their oral history, the nomadic ancestors of Ktunaxa First Nations have occupied the Columbia River Basin and Rocky Mountains of what is now British Columbia, Canada for some 12,000 years. Their stories tell of how the region’s salmon, white fish, trout, big horn sheep, grizzly bears, ducks, grouse, nuts and berries, supplied the Ktunaxa with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of plants, fish and animals.
The clear-cutting of these bountiful forests began in the 1880’s, with the introduction of the region’s railroad. For nearly a century, many industrial foresters cut trees indiscriminately, with little regard for wildlife and the long-term stability of local Aboriginal people and other communities.
In July 2004, Tembec signed an unprecedented Agreement with the Ktunaxa Nation to promote a sustainable working relationship with the tribe, recognizing that Tembec operates in their traditional territory.
Not only does the agreement define a process for consultation between the parties, it is a key aspect of the forest management certification awarded to Tembec in 2004 by the Rainforest Alliance’s SmartWood Program for a 372,000 acre tract within traditional Ktunaxa-Kinbasket First Nations lands. This is the first large forest area to be certified in British Columbia.
Said Richard Donovan, SmartWood’s Director, “It is hard to overstate the importance of this certification in Canada. Balancing the different demands on the forest, and thoughtfully involving First Nations, communities and environmental groups in forest management on a publicly owned forest is very difficult.”
In 2003, Tembec’s 5-million acre Gordon Cossens Forest received certification. It is one of the largest certified forests in the world (nearly twice the size of Yellowstone National Park) and the first boreal forest FSC certification in North America.
The Forestland Group & Sustainable Forestry
Based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, The Forestland Group (TFG) is one of a growing number of timberland investment management organizations (TIMOs) that organize and manage partnerships of institutional investors in forestlands.
The company earned its first Rainforest Alliance FSC certification in 1999 for a 32,000-acre tract of land along the Emory River in Tennessee. Five years later, TFG is on track to be the only TIMO in the world to preside over an entire portfolio that has been certified according to the terms of the FSC. It works to regenerate forests naturally, plants carefully to achieve fully stocked mixes of pine and hardwood, and establishes wildlife corridors.
Among its 1.5 million acre holdings in 11 states are large environmentally sensitive forests in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, containing 300 lakes and beautiful shorelines across eight counties. When some timber companies decided to sell acreage for residential development, a coalition led by Michigan officials and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) engaged in a high-profile campaign to buy 390,000 acres. The coalition lost to The Forestland Group.
TNC then began negotiations with The Forestland Group in hopes of securing promises of continued public access and limited development. In January, 2005, in an unprecedented $58
million land-protection agreement, TFG agreed to place a significant portion of land under a conservation easement that assures continued public access and sharply limits development. The agreement links more than 2.5 million acres of protected federal, state and natural areas across the Upper Peninsula.
“With all of the turnover in forest ownership, TIMOs are playing an increasingly important role by channeling investment money from pension funds and other investors into the forest. If managed appropriately, they can provide income to investors and manage land sustainably, and SmartWood certification provides the assurance they are managing according to our standards,” explains SmartWood senior forester Loy Jones.
US-based TIMOs currently manage over 18 million acres, and their holdings could surpass 30 million in the next decade.
One reason that so much land may be available for purchase is that financial markets have traditionally undervalued timberland, but as savvy investment advisors would be quick to point out, when well-managed, these lands are proving increasingly attractive. According to Howard Silverman in Section Z: Making our Economy Safe For People and Nature, over the last thirty years, annual returns on U.S. timberland investments have averaged 14.5%, beating the Standard and Poor?s 500 stock index by nearly four percentage points.
According to TFG’s director of forest information systems Kaarsten Turner, certification is helping TFG to:
* differentiate their product in the marketplace;
* differentiate their private equity funds for investors as well as provide a level of comfort and accountability to limited partners;
* eliminate extensive negotiations in conservation easement agreements;
* possibly reduce certain stringent characteristics of potential future state legislation.
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Read brief profiles of the other award winners.
The Rainforest Alliance helps people change their land-use practices, setting standards for long-term sustainable use of resources to preserve our planet’s great wealth of biodiversity while helping people use the resources they need.
Over the past four centuries, half the world’s forests have been cleared. The Rainforest Alliance pioneered forestry certification in 1989 with the launch of SmartWood, the world’s first sustainable forestry program. SmartWood certification guarantees forest product purchasers that the wood – whether it’s a guitar, a bookcase or raw lumber – comes from a forest or tree farm managed to conserve biodiversity and ensure the rights of local people and workers. More than 32 million acres are certified world-wide.
Farming is the leading destroyer of wildlife habitat and the largest freshwater consumer, occupying a quarter of the land on Earth. Rainforest Alliance’s Sustainable Agriculture Program has certified over 155,000 acres of banana farms, significantly reducing herbicide use, and providing workers with improved training, housing, health benefits and education. Coffee, chocolate, citrus and cut-flower farms are also certified under this program.
www.rainforestalliance.org
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