While global supply chains can offer opportunities for economic and social development, they also present serious human rights risks that companies often fail to prevent, mitigate and remediate effectively. Meaningful engagement between companies and rightsholders is critical to fully understand and address these risks, and is increasingly required by law. Yet companies often lack the capacity and processes to do so effectively.
Fairtrade International saw a clear opportunity to address this gap, and to develop and test a practical approach for facilitating meaningful dialogue between these stakeholders. Separate capacity-building workshops ensured preparedness before entering into direct exchange.
Dialogue events brought together workers in five value chains – flowers from Kenya, cocoa from Ghana, cotton from India, and sugar from Fiji and the Philippines – and commercial partners based in the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. This enabled testing across diverse supply chains and operating environments.
