Nestlé today inaugurated the USD 100 million expansion of its milk processing facilities in Kejayan, Indonesia, which has now become one of Nestlé’s ten largest milk-processing plants worldwide.
In one of the company’s largest investments ever in the country, Nestlé is aiming to double the Kejayan plant’s capacity to produce high quality nutritious milk products to meet the demand of Indonesian consumers. This will significantly increase Nestlé fresh milk intake from local dairy farmers to more than one million litres per day in the next few years from its present intake of approximately 620,000 liters per day. The Kejayan plant has always stood as a symbol of Nestlé’s commitment to Indonesia, particularly to the 30,000 dairy farmers of East Java, Indonesia who have been collaborating with the company for over 30 years. The expansion is expected to have a significant impact on the economic development of the surrounding area. An excellent example of creating shared value – for society as well as shareholders.
The first edition of the Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value was a great success with more than 500 applications received from all over the world. Thank you to all participants for sending us their project applications!
Applications received represented a broad range of approaches to problems of nutrition, water, or rural development. Examples of projects included innovative solutions for improving access to and management of water, for improving the lives of farmers and rural communities, or delivering high nutritional value to populations suffering from nutritional deficiencies.
The Nestlé Prize Screening Committee selected the best applications from the pool of entries and the Nestlé Advisory Board on Creating Shared Value will choose the Nestlé Prize Laureate. Mark your calendar: the winner will be announced on 27 May, 2010!
The Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value seeks to recognize successes in the areas of nutrition, water, and rural development. More information about the Prize can be found on http://www.nestle.com/CSV/CSVatNestle/CsvPrize/About.htm.
Nestlé will commit to the Prize winner an investment of up to CHF 500,000 for a specified period of time, to assist in the development and scale-up of the innovation.
The seventh CSR Asia Summit was held in Kuala Lumpur on 27 and 28 October 2009 and aimed to be the most innovative and challenging conference on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Asia-Pacific region. The participants were reminded that amidst the global economic crisis, CSR is more important than ever. With the theme “Sustainable Business as the Road to Recovery”, the event was attended by more than 300 delegates from all over Asia. It explored key CSR issues and strategies to demonstrate leadership in times of turbulence. Nestlé Malaysia was an active participant in the Summit, featuring exhibits to introduce Nestlé’s concept of CSR, which is Creating Shared Value (CSV). The booth showcased both local and global CSV initiatives, as well as Nestlé Malaysia’s reporting initiatives.
Nestlé’s CSV initiatives in Nutrition, Water and Rural Development were highlighted as exhibits as well as via a video. Apart from the breakout sessions, roundtables, training and stakeholder sessions were also organised for the delegates. The topics were mainly focused on Asia and brought new insights for businesses, governments, NGOs and other CSR practitioners.
When you think about agricultural advances, you probably think better tools, better fertilizers, and better techniques. However, rural farmers often simply don’t know what technology is available to them, so communications are equally important in driving agricultural advancement.
Burkina NTIC is launching the first social media network to share best practices, pricing data, and other useful information among farmers in West Africa. Similar information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives have already shown great success; earlier this year a Malian farmer organization doubled its profits by using similar communication platforms.
The webcast on the Emerging Global Food Crisis got me thinking about the sustainability of feeding programs alongside a food crisis. At the moment, Nestlé Philippines has a feeding program in place and its sustainability is dependent on the parent volunteers through the improvement of their livelihoods, which will eventually enable them to run the feeding program on their own.
In essence, however, the sustainability of a feeding program is also largely dependent on the availability of food. The presence of a school garden can be one solution to this availability problem. Just to illustrate, in Rwanda, the planted school gardens benefited the school and the community in several ways. They increased the students’ knowledge on food security and nutrition. The students acquired gardening skills, and most importantly the school garden provided constant food supply for the ongoing feeding programs in place. Some schools in the area were even provided cow sheds and hen houses, as well as Friesian cows to care for. These cows were used for the children’s milk consumption while cow dung was used for soil fertility. The feeding program enabled the schools to save money in the long run as their food supply came from their own garden. Any surplus in produce was sold to the community to garner profit, thus benefiting the school even more in the process.
Often times, land space and availability are issues to consider when it comes to producing school gardens. Click on the link to see how an NGO called Send a Cow in Uganda tackled that problem by creating “bag gardens.” Send a Cow, Uganda
In this video three Brazilian farmers talk about how genetically modified crops and biotechnology have helped change their lives.
For starters, they say biotechnology has increased the biodiversity of the environment and increased their yield and productivity. As they point out, getting the most out of fixed resources is an important part of conservation.
Perhaps most importantly, farmers say biotechnology saves them many hours of work – time which they now spend with their families.
For more than 30 years the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has worked to eradicate rural poverty in developing countries around the world. Check out this collection of videos to learn more about the organization and its work.
Soil fertility techniques developed by Pedro Sanchez are helping villages in Africa get out of poverty. In this video, Sanchez explains how simple, scalable methods are transforming a village in Sauri, Kenya.
Even with recent rains, California faces its third consecutive year of drought. UC Davis economist Richard Howitt forecasts hard times for farmers that could result in a loss of 25,000 jobs. These kinds of shortages threaten farmers around the world, solving water crises is one of CSV’s key objectives.
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