All eyes in my office were on Mexico City last Friday, where our CEO Paul Bulcke and Tensie Whelan of the Rainforest Alliance announced the global launch of the Nescafé Plan at a live press conference webcast in English and Spanish.

The plan is a CHF 500million, ten-year investment in sustainable coffee projects, focusing on three main areas of action: farming, production and supply, and consumption. It builds on the CHF 200million we have already invested in coffee projects over the past decade.

This means that over the next five years we will be doubling the amount of Nescafé coffee we purchase directly from farmers and their associations. That’s 180,000 tonnes from around 170,000 farmers by 2015.

Importantly, we are being supported towards this target by the Rainforest Alliance and the 4C Association, who will help us to ensure that all directly purchased green coffee will be compliant with internationally recognized 4C sustainability standards. In addition, we will source 90,000 tonnes of Nescafé coffee according to Rainforest Alliance (Sustainable Agriculture Network) standards by 2020.

Another top priority is continuing to build capacity among the farmers we work with. We are expanding our technical assistance programmes to provide advice on farming and post-harvest practices to more than 10,000 coffee growers per year. We will also be setting up new microfinance schemes and increasing the number of community projects focused on education, public health and water supply.

Through partnerships with public and private institutions in countries such as Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines we will distribute 220 million high-yielding, disease-resistant coffee plantlets to farmers by 2020.

In Mexico, we will be establishing our first coffee propagation centre in a coffee-producing country, through a partnership with Agromod and the National Institute of Forestry, Farming and Fishing Research (INIFAP). We have already collaborated with INIFAP on several coffee bean projects, planting almost four million coffee plantlets since 2002. With the support of these partners, we will be able to distribute five million coffee plantlets in Mexico until 2015.

It is the Nescafé Plan’s broad-reaching commitment to safeguarding not only the supply of one of our most important raw materials, but also the future of those communities who produce it, that really constitutes Creating Shared Value.

As with our Cocoa Plan, launched in West Africa last year to help cocoa farmers improve the quality of their crops, the Nescafé Plan combines world-class plant science with training and technical assistance to create a consumer-facing programme with tangible impact.

To find out more, you can watch the Nescafé Plan video Beyond the Cup.

Only two hours to go before the launch of the Nescafé Plan in Mexico City, today at 16:30 CET (09:30 Mexican time).

The Nescafé Plan brings together responsible coffee farming and production practices throughout the value chain, from farmer to consumer. You can find out which important external partners are supporting us in this global initiative by tuning in to the live webcast, broadcast in English and Spanish.

As you may already know, Nestlé works with farmers throughout the world to help improve their yields and the efficiency of their agricultural processes.

It was on this theme of rural development that I recently spoke at the 2010 Sustainable Agricultural Partnerships Conference in San Francisco, California.

The forum marked the fourth year of the summit and brought together hundreds of food and beverage manufacturers, processors, retailers, farmers and suppliers. It provided a unique opportunity for everyone - from representatives of major corporations to NGOs - to discuss strategies on how to measure and reduce water and carbon impacts throughout the agricultural supply chain.

I talked specifically about the close relationship our Gerber baby foods team has built with Michigan farmers - partnering with some for more than 35 years to obtain fruits and vegetables. Our work in this area is truly in the spirit of Creating Shared Value – ensuring that we receive the ingredients for our products while at the same time supporting local agricultural production and the communities who depend on it for their economic well-being.

Throughout the forum, I was struck by experiences others have with sustainable agriculture and how much the issue matters to them.  Hearing people like Alex Morgan of the Rainforest Alliance, Scott Exo of Food Alliance, Deane Little of New Sky Energy, Lauren Faber of the California Environmental Protection Agency, and many farmers discuss these issues underscored for me the strength and importance of our CSV proposition.

At Nestlé, I think we’re playing a key role in these debates, and have a lot to add to the conversation. To find out more about the biggest challenges companies like us face when ethically sourcing commodities, you can watch my interview with Martin Smith from Just Means.com here:

^{Keep an eye on Nestle.com this Friday 27 August at 16:30 CET, where we will be launching the Nescafé Plan in Mexico City with a live video webcast in English and Spanish!}

Michael Roberts is country director of International Development Enterprises (IDE) Cambodia. This year, the non-profit organisation was awarded the first Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value for its innovative Farm Business Advisor (FBA) project, which aims to improve the living standards of the country’s rural population by increasing agricultural productivity and income. Here, he explains the idea behind it:

Agriculture in Cambodia is at a very basic level with some of the lowest yields in the region. Consequently even very simple improvements in the quality of inputs or cultivation practices can have a big impact on productivity. Since the mid-1990s, we have been working to help Cambodian farmers increase their incomes. We began by introducing small-plot irrigation devices like foot powered treadle pumps and low-cost drip irrigation systems.

Incomes improved but even when their water constraint was solved, farmers would quickly run into another wall, which would limit profit. We spent a lot of time listening to them and found that to get the maximum benefit from better water control they needed to be able to access a more integrated package of agricultural inputs and advice.

Originally, we used our staff to deliver these services but then we realised that if a few inputs and a little advice could create significant value for small farmers then there must be a viable business in there somewhere. In 2005, we began to train and support a network of small rural entrepreneurs to become Farm Business Advisors (FBAs), selling a range of products and services to help small-scale farmers improve their farming techniques and income.

The surveys we have conducted with FBA clients demonstrate that on average, their income has increased by about USD 150 per year. This is a significant change in areas where cash income in an average household is only about USD 30 per month. The average monthly income for an FBA is currently about USD 60. This has been increasing month by month but is still too low given the amount of work they do. For now, most FBAs are content with this because of the high value that they place on the training that they receive. In the long-term, we estimate that FBAs will be able to make more than USD 200 per month as their client base, range of products, and experience grows.

IDE differs from the traditional NGO model in that we take a market-based approach to all of our projects. We treat people as customers, not beneficiaries. This simple change in perspective has profound implications on how we work. If I have to convince someone to purchase something, then my success is absolutely dependent on listening to them, understanding them, and responding to their highest priority needs.

This also means that we don’t provide direct subsidies to our customers. If we have done a good job of listening to their needs (including that for affordability) then even very poor people will be able to purchase items that improve their well being.

The Nestlé CSV Prize will help us to expand the current project, adding an additional 36 FBAs toward our ultimate goal of more than 500. We will also be leveraging the Prize to attract additional funding from several donor agencies that are planning substantial investment in the agriculture sector in over the next several years.

Once the project reaches the scale of 500+ FBAs, we expect that the franchise enterprise will be able to operate independently without additional donor funding. As we move from a successful pilot into a scale up phase we expect a number of challenges.

For instance, the FBAs have seen a rapid growth in clients over the past dry season. To ensure that most of these become repeat customers, the FBAs must find the right balance between client numbers and the amount of follow-up service that can be provided to ensure that the clients are successful.

Creating Shared Value is the very heart of this project. FBAs work with their farmer clients to increase agricultural production and improve incomes. If the farmers are successful, the FBAs are successful. If the FBAs are successful, the franchise enterprise is successful. The system flourishes only if there is real value being created at the farm level.

Earlier this year I travelled around Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan, visiting some of the communities where Nestlé operates.

I wanted to see first-hand how we’re delivering Creating Shared Value by meeting the farmers who produce our raw materials and putting a ‘human face’ to our CSV work. Everywhere I went people were welcoming and generous. They cooked special meals and delivered presentations on their farming cooperative, milk collection district or palm oil harvest. Most of them had never seen anyone who looks like me before (a 1.8m blonde) so I turned out to be more of a curiosity than I’d expected!

One of my most memorable encounters was in Thailand with a woman called Wanida. She had been running a successful bridal boutique until her husband lost his job and they had to move back to her home province. Her eyesight is no longer good enough to do intricate hand-beading but she still needed to provide for her family. She approached Nestlé, took out bank loans to buy some land (all of which she’s now paid back), installed an irrigation system by hand, and is now growing coffee and palm oil over seven hectares. Her 2010 crop will be her first coffee harvest.

As well as providing technical assistance and advice to coffee farmers in Thailand, we also work with the government doing field trials and have trained some of their scientists at our Research and Development Centre in Tours, France.

I visited a community in Doi Tung in the north whose main source of income used to be opium. Here, Nestle set up a demonstration coffee plantation with a mill and there are now 500 farmers working on their own coffee farms, and the local village has a school. They are aiming to supply top class coffee to Nespresso.

The project was started by the late Princess Mother (a marvellous person by all accounts who was and is revered in Thailand) and has as its goals improving the health and education of the local population and giving them access to sustainable – and legal – livelihoods. In fact it was the late Princess Mother who first approached Nestlé to see how we could help – and we were delighted to become involved. The Doi Tung philosophy has now spread to Myanmar, Afghanistan and Aceh.

The most eye-opening thing for me about my journey was the scale of the poverty in some of these countries and the complexity of the issues they are dealing with. I saw how Nestlé can be part of the solutions to some of these problems, by helping people to feed and educate their families, as well protecting the environment by training them in more sustainable working practices. I also saw that we can’t do this by ourselves. We work in partnerships all over the world with our suppliers, with governments and with NGOs and I saw how this gives projects the kind of 360 degree support and weight they need to really make a long term, sustainable impact.

This morning I came across a project from Imperial College, London that I think really illustrates the concept of Creating Shared Value.

E.quinox is a non-profit, humanitarian initiative designed by a group of engineering students from the university that is already successfully running in Rwanda. It focuses on making power accessible to rural communities in the developing world.

It consists of a system where renewable energy - such as solar power - is used to charge portable batteries in a central kiosk. The batteries can then be hired out to local householders in areas without mains electricity to provide power for a range of uses such as lighting, radios and keeping medicines refrigerated.

Fees from hiring the batteries are then channelled back into maintaining the kiosk, which in turn provides a salary to local people employed on the project.

The project recently won top prize in the IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition, with members of e.quinox collecting their award of USD 10,000 and the title of IEEE Student Humanitarian Supreme in a ceremony in Montreal in June.

The IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. The competition rewards students who develop, design or implement technology to solve a real world problem.

With a similar aim in mind, last year we launched the Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value, awarded annually to an individual, non-governmental organisation (NGO) or small business for an outstanding innovation or project in the areas of water, nutrition or rural development.

To the Laureate, we will commits not only an investment of up to CHF 500,000 (approximately, USD 475,000) for a specified period of time to assist the development of an innovation and bring it to scale, but also the opportunity to share knowledge and best practice with expert members of our CSV advisory board.

This year the non-profit organisation International Development Enterprises Cambodia received the CSV Prize for its Farm Business Advisors programme. Watch the film here.

Applications for the 2011 prize will open at the beginning of next year.

Released this month, a new book edited by Professor Nora Lustig, board member of the Institute of Development Studies, and Luis F. López-Calva, chief economist at the UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, examines why income inequality has declined across Latin America in the past decade, while increasing in China, India and South Africa.

Titled Declining inequality in Latin America, a decade of progress?, the book reveals that inequality has fallen in 12 of the 17 countries - among them Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru - for which comparable data is available. This includes nations experiencing rapid growth and those which are not.

According to authors, one of the leading factors that may account for this trend is the narrowing of the earnings gap between skilled and low-skilled workers, something which Nestlé’s initiatives with consumers at the Bottom of the Pyramid on the continent are helping to address.

I read about this book soon after receiving the latest figures on our Até Você selling programme in Brazil, which I needed to collect for a report. As of June 2010 we had more than 220 micro distributors and 7,500 saleswomen selling fortified Nestlé products to around one million lower income consumers a month. The programme continues to expand.

All our direct sellers in Brazil are women from impoverished areas of cities such as São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. Recruited by their local micro-distributor, they are given appropriate training by Nestlé.

Working as an independent sales representative within their neighbourhood, each seller is free to work as much or as little as she needs. On average she will make 40% more than the minimum wage and some make as much as BRL 2500 (USD 1400) a month.

As these women were rarely employed before becoming sellers of our Popularly Positioned Products (PPPs), the initiative brings an important source of new income to these areas. It gives women a renewed sense of independence and through their personalised selling method, provides consumers with nutritional guidance.

You can read more about the Até Você programme in our 2010 UN Millennium Development Goals Report, available to download here.

This afternoon (18.30 CET), the London Overseas Development Institute is holding a public discussion on the role of technology in improving the productivity and efficiency of African agriculture.

Sir Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London; Dr Christie Peacock, Chief Executive, Farm Africa; and Jim Sumberg, Research fellow, Institute of Development Studies are heading up the panel.

Part of a series on Agricultural futures in Africa, the event will explore how innovations should be generated: by formal scientific research, farmer-to-farmer communication, or an intermediate approach.

Considering the significant investment Nestlé has made has made over the past 12 months in improving the quality of raw materials we source in Africa – specifically cassava, cocoa and coffee - I will be watching the webcast with interest.

Last month we released the first of our higher-yielding, disease resistant cocoa crops – propagated at our Regional Development Centre in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire - to three farming cooperatives, who we are also training in improved farming techniques as part of the Cocoa Plan.

So far the signs have been very promising, but it will take sustained commitment from Nestlé and the farming cooperatives we work with to make this new method of sourcing a long-term, commercially viable success.

As this Guardian article notes, a similar project undertaken by the newspaper group, the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) and Farm-Africa in Katine (a rural sub-county of north-east Uganda) experienced a setback recently when cassava farmers did not fully benefit from new agricultural techniques because of poor weather conditions and not enough supervision.

The challenge for our Cocoa Plan therefore lies not only in staying on the cutting edge of plant science to create the best possible quality crops, but also to ensure that the farmers who receive these are equipped with the knowledge and tools to optimise their output and given the incentive to apply them.

On Thursday 24 June, more than 1,000 global leaders from business, governments, civil society, and academia are expected to attend the two-day United Nations Global Compact Leaders Summit 2010 in New York, of which Nestlé is a Patron Sponsor.

The largest ever UN business event on the issue of corporate responsibility, its size reflects the ambitious scope of its agenda. Priorities are those issues ‘central to corporate leadership today and essential for the achievement of sustainable markets’, with focus on what is being done to support the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Some of my colleagues will be attending, using our second MDG report - released to coincide with the summit - to share Nestlé’s experiences of assessing its actions in relation to these time-bound targets.

As someone still very new to the company, the report was one of the first projects I worked on, and it was an eye-opening introduction to the scale of Nestlé’s operations. For example, I didn’t know that it is the world’s largest direct buyer of coffee, purchasing 780 000 tonnes a year, or that it annually spends more than CHF 20 billion on raw materials.

I initially found it hard to understand how a business of this size can make a real impact at local level, but one of the case studies that really stood out was Community Empowerment through Livestock Development and Credit (CELDAC).

This initiative involves Nestlé working in partnership with the UN Development Agency to enable female dairy farmers in rural Punjab, Pakistan improve their livelihoods by providing them with training in primary livestock management and milk production and giving them access to microfinance. A main cause of economic difficulty for these women is when their animals succumb to treatable illnesses, which happens frequently. This is because there are few vets in the region, and as these are predominately men it makes contact with female farmers problematic.

When something like this makes you begin to appreciate the complex local or cultural nuances of any particular development challenge, the idea of representatives from big organisations meeting at big events to talk about the ‘bigger picture’ may seem a little removed from problems on the ground.

However that would be to overlook the existing local engagement, experience, and capacity for technical implementation that businesses with a global reach can offer specifically national and local initiatives, and the transformational effects these partnerships can set in motion.

Through CELDAC, 3,000 women have already been trained in basic veterinary skills by certified female ‘Master Trainers’, and equipped with kits comprised of medical instruments, medicines, and vaccines – not only building their capacity to rear livestock more effectively, but enabling them to become socio-economically empowered. So successful is that project that it has been taken up as a case study of public private partnerships at Harvard Kennedy School.

CELDAC’s success shows what strong multi-agency partnerships can achieve.  It doesn’t matter whether these are formed in the middle of Manhattan or in rural Pakistan, it’s the will to communicate and work collaboratively wherever you are in the world that counts.

You can download the Nestlé and United Nations Millennium Development Goals 2010 report here.

Nestle_UN _MDG_2010.pdf (1.64 mb)

Last week I was delighted to attend the official handover ceremonies of cocoa plantlet nurseries to three farming cooperatives across Côte d’Ivoire, in the latest stage of The Cocoa Plan.

The Enterprise Cooperative of Yamoussoukro (ECOYA), Agricultural Cooperative of Zoukougbeu (CADZOU), and the Association of the Women Producers of Coffee and Cocoa cooperative (AFPCC), belong to a group of six local contracted co-ops who are distributing higher yielding, disease resistant plants to farmers.

Developed by the Nestlé R&D Center in Abidjan, a total of 140,000 of these 'super cocoa trees' have already been established in plots of 20,000 each at seven cocoa nurseries, including one in Abidjan. As the rainy season is just starting, June is the perfect month for young plantlets to find the right soil, so it was high time for the first generation to be released.

Yamoussoukro was the first city to celebrate this event. Alphonse N' Goran, Chairman of ECOYA, gave me and my Nestlé colleagues - Cheikh Mboup, Head of Agronomy, R&D, and Kam-Rigne Laossi, Project Manager, R&D - a very warm welcome. Speaking to the various village heads and the members of his cooperative, he declared that Nestlé was offering them ‘a cocoa for the future’.

The second stage handover took us to Daloa. We were greeted by members of CADZOU and Local Director of Agriculture Kouaho Assi, who said that the issue of ageing cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire underlines the importance of this project for the future of the country’s cocoa culture.

The village of Divo, located in South Bandama, 150 km from Abidjan, was our final stop. Agathe Vanié, President of the 600 women-member AFPCC cooperative and organiser of the event, gave a moving speech in which she described the cocoa nursery as “the most beautiful of all presents”.

Agathe said The Cocoa Plan symbolised a revolution for the women of South Bandama, as it has finally enabled them to fight for their right to possess plots of land. Like most of her colleagues, Agathe has never been to school, and so does not know how to either read or write. She says she holds this project dear because she believes it will help her village to move out of poverty.

Agathe encouraged all the villagers to stop selling their plots of land and to join The Cocoa Plan: “We have to fight so that it becomes a success," she said. “The land we have is our only wealth.”

There are more than 500,000 small farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, the majority of whom are not motivated to produce premium cocoa, which is declining in both quantity and quality. For me, seeing The Cocoa Plan in action shows that while it is not a quick fix for the many issues facing the cocoa farming communities we work with, it is providing people with the incentive to improve their industry, and a real reason to feel proud of it.  I think that is an excellent start.

You can see my pictures from the three ceremonies here.

I was pleased to be invited to speak at the Society for International Development’s annual conference in Washington D.C. recently.

'Common ground on foreign aid: deepening the dialogue', included a broad-based audience of more than 500 people actively engaged in the field of international development. My co-panelists included Jon Ortmans from the Kauffman Foundation/Global Entrepreneurship Week, Michael Levett from CDC Development Solutions and Robert Mosbacher, Jr.of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. The audience for my session primarily consisted of entrepreneurs who do business at the local and community levels.

One of the most interesting things I took from the discussion was the degree to which they thought of Nestlé as only a chocolate company. They didn’t realise that we are the world’s largest food and beverage company, and I sensed their genuine surprise at the extent of our engagement. Not only were they interested to learn that we produce some of the USA’s best-known brands, including Lean Cuisine, Gerber and Purina, but also that because of our global commitment to Creating Shared Value, we are still able to provide a lot of support to communities at local level, particularly in our three focus areas of nutrition, water, and rural development.

Using The Cocoa Plan as an example, as I described the research and development work Nestlé has undertaken to develop higher-yielding, hardier cocoa plantlets (young plants used for plant propagation) and the steps we’ve created to take them to local farmers:

• Hardier cocoa plantlets are brought to farmers so that they will get more yield on less land
• Farmers are trained in best practice techniques to improve yields and water management
• The supply chain is then improved with more streamlined collection and distribution, directly increasing farmers’ income

I think the examples I shared underscored that Nestlé isn’t just focused on the short-term, but that our investments are meaningful and long-term. We participate in multi-stakeholder engagement to enhance social and working conditions in cocoa farming regions by collaborating with organisations like the The World Cocoa Foundation, with the goal of driving our business and strengthening local communities in ways that are truly sustainable. I was proud to join in this productive discussion, and based on the feedback I later received from my fellow panelists and audience members, I believe people appreciated learning about the work we do and the merits of Creating Shared Value.

This evening, the non-profit organisation, International Development Enterprises (IDE) Cambodia, was awarded the first Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value for a rural development project which aims to improve the living standards of the Cambodian rural population by increasing agricultural productivity and income.

Since 2005, IDE Cambodia has developed a network of small rural entrepreneurs to become Farm Business Advisors (FBAs), selling a range of products and services to help small-scale farmers improve their farming techniques and income.

The FBAs are given training and business support by IDE to assist farmers to initiate, intensify, or expand market-oriented agricultural production.

Through this approach, farmers become more effective producers and marketers, thereby increasing their revenue. In turn, FBAs earn an additional income from selling their products and services at a profit.

Creating  Shared Value is right at the heart of this project.  If the farmers are successful, the FBAs are successful.  The system flourishes only if there is real value being created at the farm level so everyone in the project is heavily invested in the farmers’ success. 

Thanks to our commitment of CHF 500,000 (approximately, USD 475,000), IDE Cambodia will significantly expand this project and positively impact an additional 20 000 people in more than 4 000 rural households. This adds to the 4 500 farmers the IDE already supports in Cambodia.

More information about the CSV Prize can be found here.

The Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value is awarded every other year to an individual, NGO, or small business. 

This is to encourage and reward an outstanding innovation for improving access to and management of water, improving the lives of farmers and rural communities, or bringing improved nutrition to populations suffering from nutritional problems.

You can watch a film about IDE Cambodia here. Pictures of the project in action are also available here.  

On Thursday 27 May 2010, experts from a range of organisations including Nestlé, the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) and the UN Office for Partnerships, will meet at our second international Creating Shared Value Forum.

International thought leaders including Dr Robert E. Black, Chair, Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr Colin Chartres, Director General of the International Water Management Institute and Ruth Oniang’o, the Founder and Executive Director of the Rural Outreach Programme (ROP), Kenya, will convene in London to explore the development challenges certain to face businesses and global partners over the coming years.

We will also be announcing the winner of our first Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value.

This interactive event is an opportunity for you to listen to and engage with some of the world’s top experts in nutrition, water and rural development. Watch the live webcast and submit your question to the expert panel, or get involved by joining the live discussion we are hosting right here on the CSV Forum pages.

A programme of the day’s events is available on our main Nestlé website, where highlights will also be posted after the event.

Last week, we made a further step in our commitment to fight the major issue of deforestation, when José Lopez, Executive Vice President of Nestlé S.A, announced in Malaysia that we are entering a partnership with TFT (The Forest Trust).

Nestlé is partnering with The Forest Trust (TFT), a global non-profit organisation, to help the company build responsible supply chains by identifying and addressing embedded social and environmental issues. Nestlé is the first global consumer goods company to become a TFT member.

Starting with palm oil, we are studying our supply chains to determine a similarly ambitious target for the pulp and paper we use. Together with TFT, we have defined Responsible Sourcing Guidelines, a set of critical requirements to guide our procurement process and to ensure compliance with the Nestlé Supplier Code. The partnership will focus on assessing suppliers' performance with respect to these guidelines and on providing technical support to those who currently do not meet the requirements, but who are committed to achieving sustainability.

Our actions will focus on the systematic identification and exclusion of companies owning or managing high risk plantations or farms linked to deforestation. We have already set the goal that by 2015, 100% of the palm oil we use will be sustainably sourced. We’ve made strong progress towards this, with 18% of our palm oil purchases in 2010 coming from sustainable sources. We expect this to reach 50% by the end of 2011.

By setting critical requirements for our procurement process and checking compliance with our supplier code, we want to ensure that our products have no deforestation footprint.

Agriculture employs over one-third of the world’s working population and three-quarters of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. We work directly with approximately 540 000 farmers around the world to help them to improve their productivity, protect the environment and increase their incomes. The wellbeing of the communities from which we draw our agricultural raw materials and source local labour is vital to our success as a business and to our shareholder value. Through rural development, providing local employment and encouraging sustainable production practices, as well as purchasing directly from small-scale suppliers and intermediaries, we not only seek to protect the supply and quality of our raw materials, but also to have a positive, long-term impact on the local economy and the living standards of rural communities.

• What are the key factors in rural development and the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger?
• How can the strengths of business be tapped more effectively and how can the weaknesses of business be best addressed?
• What can be done to promote better gender equality and to empower women?