Nestlé in society Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2015

Nestlé in society:
Creating Shared Value
Nutrition, health
and wellness
Rural development
Water
Environmental
sustainability
Human rights
and compliance
Our
people
Indirect economic impacts G4-DMA, Child labor G4-DMA
Partnership with the Fair Labor
Association (FLA)
We were the first company in the food industry to become
affiliated with the FLA, a non-profit multi-stakeholder initiative
that works with major companies to improve working
conditions in their supply chains.
To date, the FLA, as an independent external monitor, has
investigated our hazelnut supply chain in Turkey and cocoa
farming in Côte d’Ivoire on our behalf. It highlighted issues
concerning workers’ rights, child labour, working conditions
and other topics, such as the role of women. We continue to
work with them to address these findings.
Women farmers
Women make up nearly half (43%) of the agricultural labour
force in developing countries 2 , yet ILO data suggests the yields
they achieve are on average 20% to 30% lower than those of
men 3 . This is because they have less access to improved
seeds, fertilisers, equipment, training and information.
Nestlé believes that this issue must be addressed.
Throughout 2015, we continued our work with women farmers
in our coffee, cocoa and milk supply chains by providing
training on technical skills, resource stewardship and business
issues. We also promote gender awareness training, work with
women’s associations to create platforms for dialogue and
help women farmers to increase their income by growing
additional food crops.
Helping farmers develop
new income streams
Coffee is the main income source for the hamlets of Papua New
Guinea’s Baiyer Valley. While working with Papua New Guinea
Coffee Exports and Baki Kopi to develop a 4C (Common Code
for the Coffee Community) Unit in the valley, Nestlé has
developed a project to encourage farmers to develop alternative
income streams, particularly for women, such as beekeeping.
The project is a joint venture between the Baiyer District
Administration and Nestlé. The Baiyer District Administration
provides training facilities and a beekeeper, and Nestlé is
providing beehives, beekeeping equipment and queens
with broods.
The project consists of developing an apiary for use as a
demonstration and training facility, and a range of training
courses. These will focus on the inter-dependency between
coffee, fruit and vegetable production and bee activity, as well
as environmental awareness. The project will also include the
supply of beehives to Baiyer’s women’s associations.
More than 300 farmers are expected to complete the
training and begin building their own hives. The potential
annual income from three hives is estimated to be equivalent
to the average annual income from family coffee farming and
allows a more even spread of income throughout the year.
Separate monthly training courses for women and men will
follow in 2016, and a mobile honey extraction facility will also
be developed.
We are doing more to improve the lives of women in our
supply chains, by:
• Integrating women’s empowerment and gender aspects
into our Rural Development Framework;
• Publishing a Nestlé Action Plan on Women in the Cocoa
Supply Chain and commissioning the FLA to assess women
in our supply chain in Côte d’Ivoire. A progress report was
published in January 2015; and
• Helping to increase women’s representation in committees
and at managerial levels through the training of
representatives from nine co-operative societies in the
Central region of Kenya.
Boosting women farmers’
income through agritourism
Ecuador’s favourable biodiversity, social and geographic
conditions offer farmers an opportunity to diversify and to
combine tourism with agriculture. With this in mind, Nestlé
has launched a project to train farmers in agritourism and
find opportunities to generate additional income and
improve livelihoods.
The project is run with farmers from the Comunitaria
Progresista Zhucay, a community association with 26
participants, 22 of whom are women, in La Troncal-Cañar
province. Their farms – surrounded by beautiful landscapes,
such as rivers and jungle with preserved biodiversity – offer
much scope for tourism, such as tours and cocoa-farming
demonstrations. Using this environment, agritourism will
enable farmers to keep producing cocoa using good
agricultural practices and preserving natural resources.
Nestlé hired an agritourism specialist to help roll out
workshops. These covered topics including welcoming
tourists, customer service and potential development
opportunities, such as teaching tourists about cocoa farming,
fishing, talks on medicinal and ancestral plants, production of
hand-crafted chocolates and lodging on the farms.
A year into the project, 21 Nestlé Cocoa Plan farms have
received 43 visitors, boosting their income. Women are in
charge of the agritourism projects, while their husbands work
on the cocoa plots or other farming activities.
The pilot project should be fully established in 2016, when
Cocoa Plan farmers from other areas will be invited to visit and
learn from the experiences of the participants and to get
involved themselves. We will continue to run workshops, and
field technicians will monitor the progress of implementation
on each farm. Visitor numbers and their feedback will be
reviewed annually.
See Cocoa to read more about our work to promote
gender equality.
2 www.fao.org/docrep/013/i2050e/i2050e00.htm
3 www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/ent/coop/africa/download/coopafrica_
leaflet_iwd2012.pdf
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