The foundation's Forests and Agricultural Markets Initiative supports work to clean supply chains for beef and soy. Increasingly, global businesses are pledging to obtain key commodities only from sources that do not contribute to deforestation — and that requires transparency in the supply chain. A recent article in Yale Environment 360 reports on promising new efforts to track product sources:
“Trase — Transparency for Sustainable Economies — is the brainchild of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the UK-based Global Canopy Programme (GCP). “Over the next five years, we aim to cover over 70 percent of the total production in major forest-risk commodities, for the first time laying bare the flows of globally traded commodities that are driving deforestation,” says Toby Gardner, a research fellow at SEI who is masterminding the project.
Through transparency, Gardner hopes for accountability. And if the deforesters are accountable, he hopes they will stop — or be forced to stop.
The threat posed to rainforests by the international trade in agricultural commodities now far exceeds any other. At least two-thirds of deforestation comes down to a few key commodities: palm oil, soy, timber, paper and pulp, beef, and leather, according to Forest 500, a program of the GCP that ranks corporations and others according to their progress towards deforestation-free supply chains.”
Read the full story by Fred Pearce: How Tracking Product Sources May Help Save World’s Forests.
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