3. Cease, prevent and mitigate human rights risks and harms

Once the company has completed an overall saliency analysis, assessed serious risks and harms in more depth, and created a human rights strategy, it is ready to take action to cease harmful practices and prevent and mitigate the identified risks and violations.

A formal human rights strategy provides a useful framework for organizing the company’s decisions about its priorities and objectives for its work on human rights.

A company’s human rights strategy should directly reflect the findings from its risk and harm assessments, prioritizing issues that are most prevalent, serious, and within the company’s responsibility to address. The strategy should cover the company’s key salient issues, state the core objectives the company seeks to achieve through its human rights program, and identify the commodities and geographies in which the company will prioritize its efforts.

Once the company has a human rights strategy in place, it should develop indicators and set targets to measure progress.

In the early stages of maturity, the company will likely focus primarily on process indicators and targets, measuring the implementation of its due diligence systems. As the company matures in its human rights due diligence, it should measure its impact on salient issues as well. Human rights strategies should include clear timelines for transitioning from process measurements to impact assessments. Establishing human rights indicators and targets requires a formal process with clear accountability assigned at senior leadership levels

Once the company has developed its human rights strategy and defined the indicators and targets it will use to drive progress on its objectives, it is ready to develop detailed action plans.

Companies typically develop action plans for specific combinations of salient issues, commodities, and geographies—such as child labor in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa industry—though plans may address multiple commodities, human rights issues, or countries simultaneously.

The process of developing action plans should build upon the knowledge gained through in-depth assessments, including relevant root cause analysis. The deployment of action plans relies heavily on in-country personnel, knowledge, and resources. The company should plan to support its local teams, and/or those of its suppliers, to carry them out.

If a company’s own operations or business practices are directly causing or contributing to human rights harms, or potentially could cause or contribute to such harms, the company should cease those practices.

Addressing human rights issues may require adopting new business models or transforming existing ones. Companies might need to alter their product mix or reconsider certain business relationships and market operations, while avoiding the temptation to simply withdraw from high-risk countries. Progress on human rights requires engagement with governments, civil society, and industry peers to address underlying drivers of risk wherever possible. In the long run, sustained engagement is necessary to create safe and fair agricultural workplaces and value chains.

Capability building for suppliers is often an important enabler of human rights due diligence and should be included in most human rights strategies and action plans.

Many suppliers will need help to develop or improve their internal human rights-related systems and processes, adjust their business practices, better track and report data, and reduce the drivers of human rights risks or harms. Capability building for suppliers often implies formal training, but it can also include other kinds of programmatic investments. These include awareness-raising and consulting support to design and implement monitoring systems, manage risks, remediate harms identified, and track progress.

Within first mile operations, there are many target groups that can benefit from training and capability building.

Examples include the operations’ own staff, the service providers they work with (e.g. labor providers or providers of services such as crop spraying), agronomists or buying agents who visit farms on a regular basis, the farmers who sell to the operation, farm workers, and others. Training and awareness-raising programs in the first mile should be appropriate to stakeholders’ linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, and to local levels of access to technology. Any training or awareness raising program should be respectful of the time constraints faced by trainees, especially during labor-intensive phases of agricultural cycles.

Companies rarely achieve human rights objectives alone. This is because business operations span diverse geographic, political, institutional, social, economic, and cultural contexts, with root causes of human rights risks typically extending beyond any single company’s control.

Companies can collaborate with partners across the private sector, government, and/or civil society. Forms of collaboration include public-private partnerships, multi-stakeholder groups, industry-specific initiatives, industry-led platforms and associations, and landscape approaches, among others. Together with partners, companies should explore collective ways to address common human rights risks, and design interventions that align different stakeholders’ actions to complement and support one another. This is particularly important when working on landscape- or country-level root cause issues that drive risk for all companies, not just in one supply chain.