Rainforest Alliance, UTZ Merge to Create Single Agriculture Sustainability Standard
Two of the world’s leading sustainability certification bodies, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ have announced plans to merge later this year in an effort to simplify the certification process for sustainable agriculture.
Under the name Rainforest Alliance, the organization will continue to address environmental and social issues around the world, including climate change, deforestation, poverty and unsustainable farming. It will create a single global certification standard by 2019 that will streamline certification for farmers and empower companies to build more responsible supply chains, more efficiently. It will also work to expand advocacy efforts and through new partnerships ensure conservation of entire landscapes in priority regions from India to Indonesia and Guatemala to Ghana.
The future Rainforest Alliance will help ensure that more products are responsibly sourced, helping farmers and companies meet the growing demand for products with sustainable credentials.
The new certification standard will be known as the Rainforest Alliance Standard and will utilize the respective strengths of the current Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) and UTZ standards while creating a single auditing process for certificate holders. The two organizations expect the move to aid 182,000 cocoa, coffee and tea farmers currently certified under both standards, as well as new farmers, invest more efficiently in sustainability, avoiding a double administrative load of working with two standards and certification systems.
Ben Britten