Farm Labor Due Diligence: Webinar Q&A

The FLDD Toolkit applies to all agricultural commodity supply chains, with particular relevance for those that rely substantially on smallholder producers (e.g., coffee, cocoa, palm oil, sugarcane, tea, cotton). The Toolkit framework guides companies to identify the most serious and pervasive human rights issues in their supply chains, and then to take actions to address associated risks to rightsholders in an increasingly comprehensive and effective way over time. The specific actions needed do often need to be tailored to the specific issues and geographies involved, but the Toolkit should provide a solid foundational framework on which companies can base concrete plans.

This is a fair question and gets at why human rights due diligence is important in the first place. The outcomes mentioned are exactly the kinds of impacts that should be tracked and reported on as measures of impact in the Track (Toolkit Element 4) and Report (Toolkit Element 6) parts of a company’s due diligence system. Impact indicators should be designed to reflect progress on the key salient issues that exist in a company’s operations and supply chain, and should be used to drive process improvements both internally and with suppliers. Impact indicators should also be included in transparent public reporting. Most companies are only or primarily reporting on HRDD implementation (rather than impact) at this stage. This needs to change and it is up to all of us to hold them accountable on this!

You are right that it is important to consider the potential unintended consequences for workers and other stakeholders that may occur from company actions to mitigate human rights risk in the supply chain. Verité recommends that companies try to engage constructively with their suppliers to address compliance issues and underlying causes of human rights risks wherever possible, rather than “cutting and running” from problematic suppliers. Disengagement is typically costly for both workers and companies, and should be considered a last resort, to be used when efforts to support and build supplier capabilities around respect for human rights have failed. Toolkit Element 4 (Track) provides guidance on supplier monitoring and engagement; Element 3 (Cease, Prevent & Mitigate) includes guidance on building supplier capabilities; Element 1 (Embed) discusses the importance of effective supplier guidance, as well as the use of procurement practices to reinforce good supplier human rights performance.

Although it can be hard to internalize, the basic principles of human rights due diligence in commodity supply chains also apply to labor supply chains. Workers are of course not commodities, but labor recruiters (agents, brokers, etc.) are in effect suppliers of labor to the company or its supply chain partners, and subagents are upstream suppliers of potential workers to them. A company seeking to extend due diligence oversight to its labor supply chain – which is essential to mitigating forced labor risk in many sectors should establish systems to monitor its labor agencies and take steps to verify and hold them accountable for their human rights performance, just as it does with other supply chain partners. See Element 1 (Embed) for guidance on communication of requirements for upstream due diligence to suppliers, and Element 4 (Track) for guidance on monitoring and driving continual improvement of supplier human rights performance, including the performance of labor recruiters.

On the specific subject of recruitment fees, Verité has carried out many studies and investigations on the issue of recruitment-related debt and forced labor risk. We invite you to browse our Ethical Recruitment resources page. Verité’s COFFEE Toolkit also includes guidance and research on recruitment-related risks in coffee supply chains in Latin America.

The Maturity Benchmarking Tool is a summary of all of the individual, Element-level benchmarking tools in the FLDD Toolkit. The audience for the FLDD Toolkit and Maturity Benchmarking Tool are global companies, suppliers, and traders sourcing agricultural commodities. The First Mile Toolkit is a separate, companion document that was written for a different audience: first mile operations. Examples of first mile operations include palm oil mills, sugar mills, coffee wet mills, cocoa cooperatives, cotton gins, and fruit packing plants. Due diligence looks a bit different at the first mile level of the supply chain, which is why we provide a toolkit specifically for those operations.

Indeed, workers and workers’ organizations are a critical audience for these tools. We welcome input on the toolkit from anyone. There is a Contact Us area on our website; but beyond that, the entire toolkit was developed based on our work over the years which relies heavily on worker voice. All of our research and investigations have a heavy emphasis on worker engagement and input.

Guidance is provided on in-depth assessment of human rights risks and adverse impacts in Component 2.3 of the Toolkit Element 2 (Assess).

Some of the resources in our Further Resources sections are templates, but not all. We think highly of Rainforest Alliance’s due diligence tools for cocoa cooperatives, which indeed has very useful templates.

This question gets at the structural challenges for due diligence posed by common practices in the cocoa sector (and several others similar to it). Regarding the mass balance question, there are two areas where companies can put in effort: one is around supply chain mapping and risk assessment, to learn as much as possible about the risk profiles of the regions their crop is coming from, and identify ways to engage collaboratively with government, civil society, and industry peers to address root causes of common human rights issues in those regions. The other angle with mass balance purchasing is to engage the certification standard and auditing bodies you are relying on to push for robust assurance on human rights issues for your certified volumes. Companies can also set goals to convert at least a portion of their supply chain to more traceable purchasing over time.

As for trading practices in the sector, this is an issue that can only be addressed collectively, through a mix of pressure from exporting country farmers and governments and importing country regulators and consumers. We are starting to see some changes in expectations and legal requirements around farmer income and mandatory due diligence, but it remains to be seen how these will work their way down to ground level in key cocoa origins like Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

A variety of great tools are available from the International Cocoa Initiative to identify cocoa-producing communities that are at heightened risk for child labor and that facilitate risk profiling of communities based on simple, evidence-based indicators. These sorts of resources can be incorporated by companies into their mapping of supply chain risk and identification and prioritization of salient issues within specific markets. They can also be used to inform decisions about deployment of efforts for in-depth assessment of human rights risks and impacts. Guidance on assessing human rights risks and impacts and prioritizing efforts is included in the FLDD Toolkit under Element 2 (Assess) and Element 3 (Cease, Prevent & Mitigate).

This Toolkit is not meant to provide risk information about specific sectors or geographies such as cotton in India, but there is a lot of information available on human rights risks in different commodities on Verite’s website, www.verite.org. You can also find more information on labor rights risk for cotton in India in Verité’s Traceability Matrix  as well as at ResponsibleSourcingTool.org
For definitions of child labor, the core guidance is provided by the ILO Convention 138 on Minimum Age for work, and ILO Convention 182 on Worst Forms of Child Labor. National legal regimes vary across countries, so national law should also always be consulted in specific contexts.

The FLDD Toolkit does not include research on specific industries at this time, but the framework of due diligence elements and components in the Toolkit is certainly relevant to livestock operations.

We do not have plans to create a similar toolkit for other sectors at this time, but a range of resources and services from Verite related to HRDD are available from Verite. Please reach out to us for more specific information visit the www.verite.org.