Bonsucro Logo

Bulletin

Getting It Right   >  AGM 2010   >  May 2009   >   January 2009   >   November 2008  

Sugaronline Editorial - Finally Getting It Right

by Meghan Sapp
Published: 06/24/2011


Not paying attention to sustainability now is going to mean a big headache, and perhaps losses, later on.

The Maracaí mill in Sao Paulo
The Maracaí mill in Sao Paulo

Amidst all the hubbub of the FO Licht conference in Brussels this week, the real hot and exciting news is the thing that was sadly overshadowed. No, it’s not the possibility of a decent Indian crop or that Brazil might suffer more than feared from drought. It’s that after years of talk, the world finally has sustainably produced sugar.

Maybe that doesn’t sound so exciting, but it should be. The concept of sustainability is one that went from somewhat obscurity among academics in the 1970s and 1980s to finding its way into public policy in the past few years. It’s talked about in terms of biofuels, and almost always in the same breath. In agriculture, it’s a concept most thought of in terms of production in developing countries but will soon become a reality in Europe that everything one consumes must be considered sustainable.

The term in and of itself has varied over time, making it even more difficult to figure out exactly what it is, let alone how to measure it. Is it Fair Trade? And if not, why? How can it be expanded beyond this concept of Fair Trade? The attempts to answer these questions have been stakeholder-led, crop-led, government-led, all with varying forms of success and rarely an idea of whether or not the result really is sustainable. What is known, however, is that consumers are demanding sustainability and industry of all kinds must find out how to deliver it or risk losing out.

In terms of sugar, in many ways the push was biofuels-driven as the European Union made it very clear that biofuels that did not meet its sustainability criteria would not be welcome in the lucrative European market. But consumer demand for Fair Trade products has also been a major driver to find this elusive concept of sustainability for sugar. As the demands on sustainability concepts themselves have matured into a fairly clear triangle of social, environmental and economic sustainability, industry began understanding that it could find a way to determine who was sustainable and who was not.

Several industries have attempted to regulate themselves through these types of voluntary schemes from palm oil to soy, but those in the sugar industry took two very different positions. First, the programme must be developed by the entire supply chain so they made sure to include organisations like UNICA that represented mills, producers themselves like Cargill, but also traders as well as consumers like Coca Cola and NGOs like WWF. Having the entire supply chain working together to find this concept of sustainability, and make sure it worked, was vital.

The second innovation among the sugar industry was to make the scheme—that would become known as the Better Sugarcane Initiative and has since evolved into Bonsucro—is that it is based on metrics. Cold, hard facts and numbers that are hard to dispute yet set a baseline as well as benchmarks for improvement. No reliance on academic theory or development ideals of what should be or could be, no gray areas. Sustainable sugar or not: this is how you achieve it and this is how you get better.

After more than two years of consultations, the standard was developed and the certification programme was devised. This week the first mill was certified by Bonsucro, which is valid for three years with annual audits, and the first sale of certified sugar shortly followed, again making the sustainability supply chain complete. With Raizen, the Shell-Cosan JV, as the producer of the world’s first sustainable sugar at its Maracaí mill and Coca Cola the first buyer, the industry has taken an irreversible step forward that leaves no room for people to make excuses that sustainability can’t be achieved.

Now that the European Commission has given the OK as a voluntary scheme achieving the EU’s strict sustainability criteria for biofuels, Bonsucro has now taken the lead in global sustainability initiatives. As a result, cane sugar too takes its place as the global leader in sustainable commodity practices.

Yes, cane sugar. But where is beet sugar in this whole question of industry sustainability? It seems to be conspicuously absent, as if sustainability is only required in countries that might have questionable human rights or environmental protection standards. But even though the majority of beet is produced in Europe and the US, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement in environmental and social management nor that they shouldn’t strive to achieve better efficiency and economic performance.

So why all the focus on cane? If the sugar industry wants to stand out above other commodities and above other industries as a whole, then cane needs to get its beet-producing kin onto the sustainability bandwagon. Since it’s unlikely they’ll ever find Fair Trade beet sugar, the competition for consumer demand may come down to choosing between Bonsucro cane sugar and ‘unsustainable’ beet sugar.

The beet industry should take the opportunity to set its own voluntary standards before they’re forced to do so, which could become costly later rather than taking care of it sooner. Setting that baseline will be important as governments begin introducing stricter environmental regulations and consumers continue to demand more and more sustainable products. Maybe if they’re lucky, they’ll even get a price premium out of it too, but what they can’t be is left behind.


Bonsucro AGM 2010

 

Puerto Rico – a veritable jewel of an island in the Caribbean with a long sugar cane history, and more importantly, home to Bacardi, a rum with a spirit for life attitude - was the setting for the fourth Bonsucro Annual General Meeting and conference.

Read More »


Newsletter May 2009
David Willers - General Manager reports

What a busy six months for the BSI, not least of which has been the construction of two new websites – one for the BSI website on which this newsletter now appears, and one dedicated to the BSI Standard.  My thanks to Trudy and Natasha for all their hard work in designing the architecture of the new sites.

The good news is that overall the BSI has gone from strength to strength since our AGM in November last year, and the BSI is now poised for further significant growth. Several important milestones were achieved in the past six months, notably:

The BSI finally detached itself from the umbilical chord of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). This has been done entirely with the blessing of the WWF however. The WWF has, since the conceptual beginnings of the Better Sugar Cane Round Table project five years ago, hosted the BSI, undertaking its treasury function. But now the fledgling infant has taken wing and grown up.  As from January 2009, the BSI registered as a limited, not for profit Company under the laws of England and Wales. Articles of Association have been drawn up and the affairs of the Company are now overseen by a Supervisory Board of Directors to whom the Management Committee submits its recommendations for approval. 

Such independence carries obligations, however, and democratic accountability is one of them. Accordingly we held our first all-member elections by postal ballot for the ten person Management Committee in March. The Management Committee is responsible for day-to-day management of the BSI and the content of the BSI Standard while the Supervisory Board is responsible for process. The results of the election were very representative of the sugar world, with producers, users and intermediate users equally represented. (See the composition of the Management Committee and the Supervisory Board below.)

The other important event was that BSI was accepted as an Associate member of ISEAL. This highly credible body deploys peer-reviewed mechanisms to ensure complete transparency, accountability and good governance in the standards setting procedures of its members. In practice this means precise protocols that BSI has had to adopt to ensure compliance with ISEAL guidelines.

 

Foremost among these steps has been the commencement of the first 60-day public consultation period of the Version I of the BSI Standard, which was approved at the BSI’s last AGM in November.  The Standard can be viewed on its own dedicated website on www.bettersugarcane.com and the first public consultation period ran from I March 2009 to 31 April 2009. Thereafter the expert technical working groups reviewed the comments received and both comments and responses are being published on our site at the end of May 2009. Later this year the TWG’s will have produced a new Version 2 of the BSI Standard incorporating valid suggestions. In September this year the Version 2 BSI Standard will once again be placed on the dedicated Standards website for a further 30 day consultation period. After that it will be submitted to the BSI AGM, which this year will be held in early November in India. Our hope is that the BSI Sugarcane Standard will be fit for certification purposes by early 2010.

The public consultation of the BSI Standard is also being reinforced by way of stakeholder outreach workshops and I have just returned from the first of these in South Africa, where Peter Turner, leader of the BSI’s Agri TWG, organised three such opportunities to meet with a cross section of sugar cane growers, both large and small scale. In May, June, July and September further stakeholder outreach meetings have been organised in Switzerland, Brazil, India, Ethiopia, southern Africa and Pakistan, attended by the BSI secretariat in company with the TWG leaders, Maryline Guiramand, Dr Peter Rein and Peter Turner.


The comments we receive will be enormously valuable in ensuring that the eventual BSI Standard enjoys buy-in from crucial stakeholders.

Concurrent conference workshops where the BSI Version 1 Standard is also being presented include a workshop in Johannesburg arranged by the Partners for Euro African Green Energy (PANGEA). bio fuels and sugar conferences in Brussels, Brazil, southern Africa and Delhi, India.

The development of our Standard is being paralleled by the creation of an appropriate certification model, overseen by the BSI’s business model sub committee. Fortunately we do not need to reinvent the wheel in this respect, and by dint of the expertise of so many of our members who are simultaneously involved in other Round Tables, we will be able to design an architecturally robust and inexpensive approach to auditing the BSI standard in such a way as to confer tangible benefits to the producers, especially sugarcane farmers, large and small.

Being a practically minded organisation we have also accepted the offer of Cert ID, an internationally accomplished audit firm, to test our Standard in the field with several pilot audits. We are indebted to those producers, mill groups and farming associations who have agreed to open their enterprises to the scrutiny of |Augusto Freire who is heading up this operation. The most interesting outcome of the pilot studies from the perspective of the TWG leaders will be collating data and values.

 In these straitened times, money is always a sore point for many voluntary organisations, but we have been tremendously heartened by the support of our members who have unfailingly paid their subscriptions. A new fee formulae has been devised to take into account the special circumstances of sugar producing countries in the developing world, which should encourage wider membership from this sector. And our greatest gift this year has been a generous grant by the Packard Foundation towards our work. We are indebted to them. The BSI is not a wealthy organisation, and our personnel resources are thin on the ground. But the progress we have made has been due to the enthusiasm of our members and their willingness to roll up their sleeves and pitch in with actual report writing and analytical work, not to mention the provision of free venues for meetings and the like. Fortunate indeed are other organisations that receive this level of involvement from their supporters!

Our focus on developing the BSI Standard has not distracted us from continuing to build contacts and alliances with a range of organisations and during the past six months we have met with a number of sugar cane producers, organisations like the International Sugar organisation, and various Round Tables and government representatives. These diplomatic outreach initiatives will continue, as the BSI Standard becomes an auditable reality, which could prove of immense value to producers and users alike. 

The press has not been neglected and several good articles on the BSI have appeared in influential journals and have been reproduced on the website.

We are now looking forward to the next six months and in particular the build-up to our 2009 AGM which this year is being hosted by EID Parry, one of India’s most progressive and oldest sugar groups. But before then, in September, as already mentioned, the second phase of the public consultation on the Standard will commence with another opportunity for you to air your views our website. We’ll keep you informed closer to the time, but all comments will be very welcome!

Ends
 
Management Committee elected to office for the period March to November 2009.

 
  Daudi Lelijveld, Farideh Bromfield, Geraldine Kutas,Mumbully Gopinathan, Kevin Ogorzalek,
Robert Quirk, Sven Sielhorst, Clare Wenner, Dave Howson, Lauren Iannarone.
 

Supervisory Board members:
   
  Daudi Lelijveld, Farideh Bromfield, Hari Morar, Jeroen Douglas, Mark Eckstein, Ignacio Gavilan.

 

Newsletter January 2009
David Willers - project manager.

2009 has started well, and on a positive note, following the BSI’s very successful mid- November AGM hosted by Unica in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Outgoing Chairman Hari Morar’s speech is reproduced in full in this newsletter) The highlight of the AGM was acceptance by the BSI steering committee that the draft BSI metric sugarcane production standard, subject to further refinements, could go forward to the next level – preparation for the public consultation phase.
  

Members Brazil 2008


Followers of the BSI standard will recollect that as 2008 dawned, the standard was but a glimmer in the eye. While certain principles and criteria had been broadly established during the preceding two years of meetings and discussion between stakeholders, there was not yet a definitive document replete with indicators against which the criteria and principles could be assessed.

All that changed during the course of the year, as the three specialist technical working groups got to grips with their subject.  Numerous meetings, field trips and conferences and an awful lot of midnight oil later, and the standard began to take shape as a coherent piece of work.  Initially the challenge was to identify indicators that could be expressed in metric terms – a very difficult task given that this is the first time anywhere that a comprehensive metric standard for sugarcane production has ever been attempted; later, the challenge was to reduce the number of indicators to manageable numbers without diluting the core integrity of the standard.

Now, following further prolonged working sessions of the TWG leaders in December 2008 and early January 2009, there is confidence that the BSI has the makings of a practical, affordable and readily implementable standard that will make a real global contribution towards reducing the impact of sugarcane production, the social aspects associated with it and the products – mainly ethanol and sugar – derived from it. Metric standards have an advantage over other practice defined approaches to standards, inasmuch as they are non-prescriptive and do not presume to instruct growers and processors how to manage their businesses, on the one hand, and on the other, foster regional impact reductions rather than simply reductions by individual farm units.

Metric standards are also uniquely suited to catchment type measurements which makes them especially suitable for small scale agricultural activities such as are typically found in least developed countries.
The evolution of the BSI standard has gone hand in glove with an evolution of the BSI structure itself, designed to reinforce the BSI’s legitimacy in the eyes of stakeholders. Key decisions taken at the AGM in Brazil will ensure that BSI combines a legitimate governance structure that meets the need of stakeholders with an efficient decision-making model.

The BSI is hard at work implementing these decisions. The agreement to join the ISEAL alliance and to incorporate the BSI as a Non-Profit Company limited by Guarantee in the United Kingdom has been the most important. Compliance with the ISEAL Code of Good Practice means that organizations have decision making structures for standard setting that ensure an open and transparent process and balanced stakeholder engagement.

In practice this means  addressing such aspects as diversity of membership, board elections and board representation, member categories, decision making , income generation, conformity assessment and of course, last but not least, standard setting.

BSI applied for, and after an exhaustive scrutiny by the ISEAL Board, was granted associate membership of the organization in late December 2008. The BSI is currently developing a compliance roadmap which will demonstrate its adherence to the core ISEAL requirements as regards the BSI standard and other governance issues.

By the same token wheels were put in motion for incorporation as a company limited by guarantee.

Transition

The transition to the new order was started in Brazil and is now well underway.
The old informally constituted Steering Committee has been replaced by an elected Transitional Management Committee (TC) who will represent the membership pending a further election involving the entire membership of the BSI.  It was agreed that 70% of TMC members must be present for a quorum at future meetings
The following people were nominated by Dave Gibson (IFC) and seconded by Denise Knight (Coca Cola):

  • Mark Eckstein (WWF)
  • Farideh Bromfield (EDFMan)
  • Ignacio Gavilian (BP)
  • Jeroen Douglas  (Solidaridad)
  • Daudi Lelijveld (Cargill)
  • Hari Morar (Tate & Lyle)
  • Gopinathan Mambully  (EID Parry)
  • Geraldine Kutas (UNICA -Brazil)
  • David Howson (Bacardi)
  • Robert Quirk (Australian Sugar Cane Farmer)

The alternate members of the TMC were also nominated by Dave Gibson and seconded by Denise Knight:

  • Alex Smith (Greenergy)
  • Lauren Iannarone (Shell)
  • Olivier Genevieve (Ethical Sugar)
Other committees
Mark Eckstein, Farideh Bromfield, Geraldine Kutas, Dave Gibson and Lauren Iannarone will form a working group to define the governance and business model for the BSI. 
Hari Morar was appointed chair of the TWG standard consultation committee to ensure transparency and will be aided by Farideh Bromfield and Mark Ekstein.

Election of Chair and Vice Chair
After a year in the Chair, Hari Morar stepped down in terms of procedure. Hari has done an absolutely tremendous job in the role, giving a great deal of his valuable time to the cause of the BSI in which he believes so passionately, and his speech on the achievements of the BSI in 2008 can be read  in full below.

Elections for the new chair and vice chair were as follows: 

  • Geraldine Kutas nominated Daudi Lelijveld
  • Seconded by Robert Quirk
  • Robert Quirk then nominated Farideh Bromfield for the position of Vice Chair
  • Seconded by Hari Morar

There were no other candidates and the Chair (Daudi Lelijveld) and Vice Chair (Farideh Bromfield) were duly elected by a unanimous show of hands.
I am sure BSI members and supporters will want to wish them all the best in their new office!

A Big Thanks!
To – Geraldine Kutas, and her colleagues at Unica, who so generously hosted our AGM in Brazil and organized a wonderful field visit. It was so popular that we had to curtail numbers which gives some idea of how popular the BSI function was overall, with a very enthusiastic participation by members.

However, Hari Morar, has also expressed his gratitude to Unica in his opening speech to the AGM below:

“I would like to welcome you all to the second of our annual, formal, BSI meetings of the Steering Committee which, for want of a better word, we are referring to as our first AGM.   
In the strict sense of the word that is a deficient description because we have few of our world wide family of signed up and registered members here today – we have almost 70 such members in total now – but because we are electing our chair and vice chair and will be introducing far reaching governorship changes, which will lead to full membership elections for office in two months time, I think we can safely say that the BSI has come of age and this is effectively our first proper AGM.

I consider myself on safe ground when I express our sincere thanks on behalf of the full BSI membership to our hosts, UNICA and the Brazilian Sugar Industry, for providing such an exceptional and appropriate venue for our deliberations.  


Hari Morar - Outgoing Chairman


Marcos Jank has given us an eloquent description of the far reaching changes that are being made in the Brazilian sugar industry to ensure sustainable production through the entire value chain.   Marcos, we know how busy you are and how engaged the local industry is in this vital work, and so your kind gesture in taking the BSI under your wing is all the more appreciated.

II would like to add that our industry which has been developed over several centuries has never before been faced with a more staggering challenge – To deliver the demand for food, drink, and fuel - but in a truly measurable, and sustainable manner!
Sustainability is therefore a journey that all sugar producers and companies, throughout the supply chain, MUST now embark upon!    
Our industry as a whole must work together towards an aligned, coordinated, holistic solution approach.  This is the only way to avoid issues of displacement and attain a ‘true’ sustainability with regards to raw materials sourcing.            
Sustainability is not just about the socio-political/environmental issues – it is about staying in business too!  
There has therefore never been a more critical time to ensure that we are totally engaged with our value chain.

We’d also like to pay a special tribute as well to Geraldine Kutas of UNICA for having gone the extra mile and beyond in helping the BSI secretariat make all the necessarily time consuming arrangements that go into meetings such as these.    Geraldine, we are all looking forward to the various functions you have arranged and especially to the field trip which I know has been hopelessly oversubscribed.    I am aware that there are some of you who are with us today who have been disappointed not to get a seat, and I can only say that this is a reflection of the deep interest there is in the work of the BSI and its interaction with the Brazilian sugar industry.
I would like to welcome Marcos and Geraldine’s colleagues from UNICA as well as our other observers – some of you attached to BSI member companies, others who have come from far and wide to be here today.     You are too numerous to mention, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say how pleased we are to see Charlotte Opal of the Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) who will be talking to our SC tomorrow.    You are all most welcome and I hope this won’t be the last time we see you at one of our meetings.

The year under review has arguably been the most productive during the BSI’s short history.   At the conclusion of our last annual meeting at the end of last year, we confirmed our decision to develop a metric rather than a process based Better Management Practice (BMP) driven standard, and in an important act of faith, the then smaller corporate and NGO membership agreed to raise exceptional extra funds to make possible the establishment of technical working groups to identify standards or indicators that can be measured, which allow an assessment to be made of whether or not associated criteria are being met.

At that stage we had no idea who would lead these groups and what the composition of their teams would be.
But within three months the exercise was well underway and by June 2008 the TWG teams were in place and intensive consultation was taking place.

Each month at our regular SC teleconferences the TWG leaders – Maryline Guiramand (social), Dr Peter Rein (Processing Milling) and Peter Turner (Agronomy) very obligingly briefed us on the latest developments and difficulties they may have been encountering. 

All the TWG leaders have struggled to re-invent methodology and interpret data in their search for a robust and objective standard for sustainable sugarcane.    Maryline in particular has had a very difficult time, since developing metric measurements of social concerns has been extremely difficult and at times frankly impossible, which has necessitated different approaches.    A great deal of consultation with wider civil society still lies ahead and no doubt more adjustments will be made, but this is a healthy process and transparent.    I am very proud of the commitment of the TWG leaders and the innovation and originality they have brought to the development of the BSI sugarcane standard and I thank them most sincerely on behalf of all of us for their enterprise.

We hope that in the year ahead the work of the BSI standard setting process will appeal to a wider community and to more new members – especially producer members – joining the BSI.       
I have already mentioned Brazil but let me also immediately say how very pleased we are to be able to welcome key elements of the Indian sugar industry by the membership of EID Parry Ltd. in our ranks.    In one fell swoop the BSI now has representative membership of 70 percent of the world sugarcane production.  

These key producer members join another vital element to have joined the BSI this year, and that is core Oil and Bio Fuel members BP, Shell and Greenergy.    
The inclusion of these members has given a welcome boost to our still modest funding base and has ensured our continuing independence from government or other similar institutional sponsorship.   
A concern expressed by producers however, is that a need to meet standards will impose reporting and measurement demands which soak up manpower, time and money.    
For there to be buy-in by sugar producers, there must be some benefits in joining BSI and being prepared to adopt the BSI Principles, Criteria and Standards.  
These are likely to include:

  • A means of self assessment and performance improvement measurement
  • Means of benchmarking against others
  • Sustainable production leading to greater productivity in the longer term
  • Some credits (monetary) as a premium for producing sugar sustainably
  • Perhaps, an alternate a way of by passing trade barriers
  • For industries already meeting the conditions, a levelling of playing field in terms of meeting environmental and labour related issues
  • Management of risk and liability
  • Enhancement of brand image and reputation.

It is worth emphasising that in the long run it is expected that conforming to such standards will save money, as inputs such as energy and raw material are used more efficiently, losses and wastage are minimised and manpower is used more productively.

We have not neglected governance and business model issues during the past year since it is very important that the process of developing standards and indicators is entirely transparent and inclusive.    We will be taking advice from ISEAL, an international body that provides framework pointers for exclusivity and transparency, and are in the process of joining them.     We will also hopefully be overlaying a new governance structure on the BSI tomorrow, the centrepiece of which will be a manageable transitional management committee, with specific subcommittees overseeing governance and elections to an elected MC in early 2009, and the development of a new self funding business model for the BSI and finally the TWG public consultation phase.

Nor have we neglected the important business of getting our message out in the public arena.     The BSI is not operating in a vacuum, and other standard setting bodies are coming to prominence, some of them concerned with developing sugarcane standards such as the ProForest Greenergy initiative, SEKAB in Sweden and the RainForest Alliance to name but a few.     Together with the UK’s Renewable Fuels Agency we hosted a conference sponsored by Greenergy – a recently joined BSI member – in London which was designed to assemble some of these standard setting bodies and discuss the way forward in terms of convergence and cooperation.    It would be safe to say though that as far as BSI is concerned, we are currently the only global multi-stakeholder standard setting Roundtable specifically concerned with sugarcane.

Next week we will be presenting the outcome of our work this year and our vision to the International Sugar Organisation (ISO), arguably the worlds most influential intergovernmental body concerned with sugar and ethanol.   

During October, the equally influential International Society of Sugarcane Technologists (ISSCT) also considered a report on the work of the BSI prepared by our TWG leader Dr Peter Rein who is a past President of the ISSCT, a sugar technologists society which is more than 70 years old.

The BSI cannot complain that it is not being listened to, and we hope this will lead to much wider producer participation among developing countries in particular, notably the LDC and ACP blocs. It is here we hope our standard will lead to measurable sustainability improvements in the sugarcane foot print.   At the same timed we also recognise that these countries will not join us if the BSI standard becomes an intolerable burden and obligation. These countries and industries can only deliver so much within their capacity.   This has relevance for the BSI process and I am sure there will be much discussion about this in the months ahead.
Ultimately however our standards must be practical, robust and cost efficient, easy to implement and easy to understand.

I would like to thank my fellow steering committee members for their sterling input in 2008.   

David Willers has encountered nothing but helpfulness and enthusiasm from BSI members for our noble project and he and I are very appreciative.    

Amongst working with other roundtables, meeting new prospective members and other bureaucratic issues for the BSI through David has had meetings and consultations with:

Packard Hulett Foundation
Round Table on Sustainable Biofuels
ISSCT
WWF EU/ WWF UK/ WWF SA/WWF Sweden
Oxfam
RainForest Alliance
SASA 
IDB South America (Development bank for Latin America)
ISEAL
ProForest
GTZ - germany
SEKAB Sweden
The City of Stockholm ethanol/biofuels division
Low Carbon vehicle Organisation UK
RTFO/RFA UK
Whitsunday Natural resources
Better Cotton Initiative

The list is not exhaustive.

David and I would also like to thank Mark Ekstein for his outstanding advice on the standard setting front.   

Our website now experiences over 90,000 hits per month.

And finally, and most important, I must thank far flung members of the different TWG teams for their able and expert advice and work. I hope the TWG leaders will convey to them all our extraordinary appreciation for their input.     In the New Year the intention is to bring these teams together in one venue to consolidate the work undertaken on standards and who knows, it may be possible for me to meet them during that occasion although it will be as a fellow member and no longer as chairman of BSI.  

To my successor as chairman however, to be elected tomorrow, I wish to say the warmest good luck!


Newsletter November 2008
David Willers - project manager.

The BSI has had a terrifically busy third quarter, with the technical working groups developing the BSI sugarcane standard hard at work. Considering that the TWG leaders, Maryline Guiramand, Dr Peter Rein and Peter Turner only took on the assignments a little over six months ago, the progress they have made in developing the world’s first largely metric standard for sugarcane production is little short of astonishing. The task involved building teams of experts (their details are posted on the BSI website elsewhere) in their respective fields, namely social, milling/processing and agriculture, and then developing metric indicators referencing the BSI principles and criteria. It’s been a huge job, involving a lot of travel and hundreds of phone conferences and emails. As can be imagined with such ground breaking science, considerable innovation not to mention invention has been required. But at the BSI’s next get together on the occasion of the November steering committee in Sao Paulo, Brazil, there will be an opportunity to see the fruits of their labors.

After November BSI will move into a consultative phase on its standard in accordance with ISEAL guidelines and there will be an opportunity for all interested parties to comment, make inputs etc. We are simultaneously also examining our governership structures, given the BSI has become an organization with a distinct identity over the past year and that will also be discussed in Brazil. I’ll give a further report on what transpired in December.

We have attracted some important new members in the past quarter as well. Their details are also available for public scrutiny in the members section, but suffice it to say that we warmly welcome EID Parry, one of the biggest Indian producers and Greenenergy, an important Biofuels company in the UK.

Other of our activities included a most successful joint conference between the Renewable Fuels Agency and BSI in London which was sponsored by BSI member GreenEnergy on verification issues. A number of organizations including the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels gave presentations. The link to the presentations which are all available is as follows:
BSI was also ably represented at an important world conference in Egypt by former BSI chairman Robert Quirk. This was the IS-2008: IS-2008 is the international Association of Professionals in Sugar and Associated Technologies (IAPSIT). The key note speaker Dr. Peter Baron the CEO of the International Sugar Organization, commented on the importance of the sugar industry lifting its environmental image. He referred to the work of BSI and said we would be presenting a report on the work of the BSI at the ISO’s own annual meeting in London in late November 2008.
I would like to thank Peter Baron for his kind words about the BSI in such an important forum. Robert Quirk presented a paper on the work of the BSI, in "Premier Sugar Crop Research Institutes &Sugar Companies of the world." Section.


  Robert Quirk


Robert was able to tell the 400 delegates from 20 counties that, BSI is chaired by Hari Morar from Tate and Lyle, and the Steering Comm. includes a broad cross section of producers, millers, refiners, and investors as well as the major users and traders of sugar globally. And further that we had three technical working groups consisting of global experts putting together our standards for growing, milling and social. The conference was held at the Sinai University in Al-Arish in the Sinai... Robert was one of those given the privilege to thank the organizers and the Egyptian Government on behalf of the delegates at the closing ceremony.

The conference had 187 papers presented (two of which he presented and co-authored another) during the proceedings in 6 concurrent sections on the" Topics of Meeting the Challenges of Sugar Crops and Integrated Industries in Developing Countries." The profile and acceptance of BSI was greatly enhanced by Robert’s attendance at the conference and through this newsletter he has thanked the Australian Sugar Research and development Corporation for their assistance in helping him to travel to the conference.

Another interesting development during the quarter was circulation to his professional colleagues by Dr Peter Rein, leader the processing/Milling technical working group, of a very concise report on the BSI and current developments and plans. Supporters and members of the BSI will find it most interesting. It is reproduced below:


Introduction
There is an increasingly wide acceptance of the fact that all agricultural and industrial enterprises need to operate in a manner in which not just the economic but also the social and environmental factors are promoted. At the same time energy use, production efficiency, elimination of wastage and the effect on global climate change all need to be considered.
The pressure for a system to certify that sustainable practices are being adhered to has come largely from the market place. A number of large industrial consumers of sugar want to be able to certify that sugar and other ingredients in their products are produced by means of sustainable practices. This initiative is most pronounced in the area of befouls, where for instance the import of biofuels into Europe requires that these fuels are produced following sustainable practices. The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels is well advanced in finalizing their guidelines for sustainable biofuel production, and will require these to be met by prospective producers.
However it is not only the consumers that are the driver for measuring sustainability. Society at large realizes the responsibility it has to the greater welfare of the planet. Many people and organizations see sustainable development as the most significant issue facing society today.
The emphasis on sustainability is growing rapidly. The sugar industry has much to gain in being involved, because the natural advantages will surely position the industry more favorably as an agro-industrial industry contributing positively to the well being of all.

Better Sugarcane Initiative
The Better Sugarcane Initiative (BSI) is a collaboration of sugar retailers, investors, traders, producers and NGOs who are committed to sustainable sugar production by establishing principles and criteria that are applied in the sugarcane growing regions of the world. The BSI has embarked on an exercise, the main aim of which is to promote measureable standards in key environmental and social impacts of sugarcane production and primary processing while recognizing the need for economic viability. The BSI is funded by members, among whom are consumer companies (e.g. Coca Cola, Cadbury Schweppes), commodity traders (e.g. ED & F Man, Cargill), NGOs (e.g. WWF, Solidaridad/Fairtrade), national and local producers (e.g. UNICA,EID Parry) and oil companies (e.g. Shell, BP). They constitute a Steering Committee, which directs its activities, and it is managed by a Project Manager.  The BSI web site explains its activities (www.bonsucro.com ).
The process that has been embarked upon requires the principles to be stated and the associated criteria, which are the conditions that need to be met to adhere to the principles, to be established. The Principles and Criteria for BSI have been drawn up, modified a few times and accepted by the Steering Committee. The Principles accepted are:

  • Obey the Law
  • Respect human rights and labor standards
  • Manage input, production and processing efficiencies to enhance sustainability
  • Commit to continuous improvement in key areas of the business
  • Actively manage biodiversity and ecosystem services

BSI have established three Technical Working Groups (TWGs) to identify standards or indicators that can be measured, which allow an assessment to be made of whether or not associated criteria are being met. Expert groups cover the three areas of (1) social and labor issues, (2) processing/mill issues and (3) agronomic practices. The membership of the TWGs covers most of the important sugarcane producing areas and so many of the major players in the worldwide sugar industry are a part of the process. These expert groups are presently in the process of putting together the standards and indicators required.
A concern expressed by producers is that a need to meet standards will impose reporting and measurement demands which soak up manpower, time and money. For there to be buy-in by sugar producers, there must be some benefits in joining BSI and being prepared to adopt the BSI Principles, Criteria and Standards. These are likely to include:

  • A means of self-assessment and performance improvement measurement.
  • A means of benchmarking against others.
  • Some credits (monetary) as a premium for producing sugar sustainably.
  • Alternatively a way of by-passing trade barriers.
  • For industries already meeting the conditions, a leveling of the playing fields in terms of meeting environmental and labor related issues.
  • Management of risk and liability
  • Enhancement of brand image and reputation

In the long run it is expected that conforming to such standards will save money, as inputs such as energy and raw material are used more efficiently, losses and wastage are minimized and manpower is used more productively.

Status of the BSI Process
A draft set of principles, criteria and standards has been drawn up and is being modified with the help of the expert groups. It is proposed to present this to the AGM of BSI in Brazil on 13 and 14 November, and then to the ISO meeting in London on 20 November. These standards are then going to be made public and posted on the web site to invite comment.
It is very important that the process of developing standards and indicators is entirely transparent and inclusive. This is vital if the standards developed are to have international credibility. In this respect it is intended to engage widely with the stakeholders in all spheres of operation and to encourage participation through comments, suggestions and input of any kind. Attempts will be made to adhere to international guidelines for the setting up of our standards, as typified by the ISEAL Alliance (www.isealalliance.org ), a body set up as a collaboration of international standard-setting and conformity assessment organizations focused on social and environmental issues. Ends 


  Bonsucro is an Associate Member of the ISEAL Alliance