Listen to Antonie Fountain, managing director of the Voice Network
Many of us know that dependence of developing countries on raw commodities leaves them vulnerable to price volatility and sees profit made in countries where the commodity is imported and then processed, rather than where it is produced. It's often farmers in those developing countries who are at the end of the line. That problem has been specifically highlighted in the cocoa sector this year.
To discuss what's happening here, our guest is Antonie Fountain, managing director of the Voice Network, watchdog and catalyst for a reformed cocoa sector. Antonie is also the co-author of the Cocoa Barometer, the biennial review of sustainability in Cocoa.
In this episode, you’ll hear more about:
“The broader environment of these four regulations (CSDDD, Green Claims, EUDR, and CSRD) plus one on forced labour, will actually be a sea change to say that companies are going to have to be more honest about the problems in their supply chain and a lot more transparent about what they're doing. Not just about how much money they're spending but about whether what they're doing is actually working. That's going to be a major solution to a lot of the structural and long-term challenges that we face.”
Is it really is possible for companies to "do the right thing"?
There's very little pressure being applied to companies by investors looking at how they're actually behaving and treating human rights as a core business priority. This needs to change.
Investors shouldn't just take companies' word for what they're doing; they should investigate what the companies are actually doing regarding human rights.
