Chapter 5: Looking ahead
Annual report 2022
Some keywords for the year to come: carbon insetting, climate resilient farming communities, living income interventions and agroforestry! Read more about some of the highlights of the year to come in this chapter.
DREAM FUND
The coming year will be a big one for our Dream Fund programme, as we will be tracing the first insetting CRUs throughout coffee supply chains. ‘CRUs’ is insider language for a Carbon Removal Unit: a traceable unit stemming from the removal of a certain amount of carbon from our atmosphere. Or, to put it another way: in this case, coffee farmers have planted trees on their farms, capturing carbon with that, and selling that as carbon credits to companies that are looking to become carbon-neutral. We will make it possible for coffee companies to trace those units back to the farmers who produced the coffee that they are selling, thus proving that they are actually working on making their own supply chains more sustainable.
RECLAIM Sustainability! continued
2023 marks the third year of the 5-year programme RECLAIM Sustainability!. In this programme, Fairfood and partners work on genuine sustainability in international agri-food supply chains, that enables the people who produce our food to earn a living income and have a voice in decision-making processes (read more in chapter 3). Fairfood acts as an innovation lead, and as such, set out to engage corporates in the three traceability pilots we are running in Honduras, Sierra Leone and Uganda.
Year 1 was about setting up those pilots, whereas year 2 was about having corporates commit to the pilots. If we’d have to give the year to come a title, it would be ‘Testing partnerships’ – with all partners in place, the tracing of products being in full motion, and new insights on farmer’s livelihoods coming in, we are testing the resilience of partnerships, of supply chains, and the potential for scaling up.
Closing the gap: Trabocca continued
2022 has been an exciting year for our partnership with Dutch coffee roaster Trabocca – from commissioning a living income benchmark for Ethiopian coffee farmers to calculating the living income gap, and exploring the interventions that may close this gap (read more in chapter 3). The coming year will be even better. Phase B of our partnership – that is: the interventions – was just approved by the funder, the Corporate Responsibility Fund by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate and Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. This means that 2023 is all about implementing the interventions and thus actually starting on closing the living income gap!
Agroforestry: Verstegen continued
As we continue our joint work on traceable nutmeg with a transparent background story, our partnership with Verstegen is further expanding. It was the final weeks of 2022 that we signed the papers: a new project is coming up, focusing on agroforestry for Indonesian white pepper farmers! That’s just all about we can say at this point, although it’s hard to not give in to the enthusiasm that’s being felt in our and Verstegen’s team, and just spill the beans. More about this project soon!
