Voluntary Sustainability Standards: building back better in the food value chain

Value chains have become a dominant feature of world trade over the past decades in part due to technological innovations allowing firms to split production processes across countries.

However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has had profound consequences on the food value chain, on both supply and demand. New cross-border and domestic restrictions on movement around the world have impacted the whole food value chain from farmers to consumers, including the processing, transport and logistics stages. These measures have resulted in job losses and increasing food insecurity and poverty.

Current trade patterns also have important environmental consequences that constitute a new challenge needing to be addressed.

Despite its far-reaching consequences, the COVID-19 pandemic thus represents an opportunity to integrate more sustainability into the food value chain through the use of sustainability standards to foster transparency and traceability.

Voluntary Sustainability Standards are norms and standards that are used to ensure that a product is produced, processed or transported in accordance with certain sustainability metrics. Widely used today to govern environmental, social and ethical issues in global supply chains, they present an opportunity for developing countries to be equitably integrated into the world economy.

Voluntary Sustainability Standards have been introduced into the world trade as a tool to firstly reduce the burden of the food system impacted by COVID-19 on farmers and producers; and secondly to mitigate the environmental situation of the food system, shifting away from unsustainable production and consumption, integrating instead sustainable development in the context of food systems in developing countries.

This trade tool to integrate sustainability into trade agreements and foster more sustainable outcomes along the food value chain will be presented by Rudi Lambert from UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, on Monday, April 26 at the online event: “What’s behind the deal? Innovative trade tools to increase the sustainability and transparency of global value chains”.

Watch the full webinar

This webinar is the second in a series throughout 2021 which will focus on a particular theme or message of the One Planet network. In April this message centres around the relationship between trade and sustainable consumption, and how trade policy and trade tools effect the sustainability of global value chains.