I am just wondering. This whole concept of multi-stakeholder dialogues about standards, sustainability and what you have. Does it actually work? I have now seen quite a few of those dialogues. For one thing: they take forever. And once they are finished you actually accomplished something. And there is a lot of frustration. And everybody can join. And it is very politically correct to do the multi-thing. But can we find more efficient ways without driving business crazy?
I propose the "Dedicated Stakeholder Dialogue". Let's say you have a supply chain for cashew. Whoever takes the initiative maps the relevant actors in the supply chain, basically from farmer to buyer. Who's relevant: all actors that invest into that supply chain. The farmer because he or she buys inputs and sells cashews, the buyer because he buys those packs with cashews from a packer or whatever and that farmer supporting organization that invests donor money into increasing productivity and quality.
Those actors use one of the available sustainability scanning models to find out what the hot spots are in the supply chain. Then they start thinking about solutions, maybe even writing them up as a standard, get going in a pilot, have Wageningen University evaluate if what should work actually works and up-scale the whole lot.
Works if actors in the chain are committed to each other. Anyway, we are going form preferred supplier to preferred buyer anyhow. With increasing commodity prices and volume pressure the supply chain for most commodities will experience a turn-around.
Result: fast track sustainability, isn't that what we want, really?
