Many Americans wake up to a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and a glass of Tropicana orange juice, but few know the true story behind their favorite food products. Now, Oxfam America has released a comprehensive report that measures how the world’s 10 largest food companies perform on food justice issues. The report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation, and it’s called “Behind the Brands.” The 10 companies Oxfam scores are Associated British Foods, Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. Collectively, these companies make $1 billion a day, according to Oxfam. No company emerges with passing grades.
Oxfam has also launched an interactive website accompanying the report, which grades each of the companies according to seven criteria: small-scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate change, women’s rights and transparency.
Chris Jochnick talking:
What we found is that, across these seven issues that you just mentioned—farm workers, women, water, land, greenhouse gas emissions—all of the 10 companies have some projects in the field, are doing some things right, but in general are failing to do what they could do to create a better system that ensures that all of the people in the food chain, from the farmers all the way to the consumers, benefit from it in some way.
And in particular, what we found is a lot of opacity. It’s just very difficult for people to understand, as your lead-in said, what goes on behind their bowl of Kellogg’s or their drinks from Pepsi. That whole system is very obscure. And so, in particular, we were putting a spotlight on questions of transparency and accountability. We’re trying to ask companies, do they actually know how women are treated in their supply chains? Do they know how many women are in their supply chains? Do they recognize the unfair treatment of smallholder farmers and workers or the threats to their land and water, and are they reporting on it? So, we were trying to focus on those larger bigger-ticket issues that go largely unaddressed by most of the companies.
we know that some of the companies are doing good projects like that in the field, and Oxfam has actually worked with some of those companies to help them improve the way they’re doing business in the field. But this report looks at something at a broader level. It’s not just those pilot projects or smaller projects that we want to get at. We want to understand how the—not just the few hundred or few thousand farmers are faring, but how the hundreds of millions of farmers are faring throughout this global food system. And so, we didn’t try to go into the field and examine projects project by project, and we also didn’t look at scandal by scandal. We were taking a broader look at whether the companies are doing their due diligence. Are they reporting on it? Are they transparent about it? And are they forcing these commitments that they have publicly made to sustainability and to farmers—are they forcing them down through the supply chain, where we know they exercise enormous influence?
Associated British Foods, or ABF, was the company with the lowest score. It scored just one mark out of the 10 in its treatment of land, women, climate change. Its highest score was just three out of 10 in relation to workers and transparency.
We know that none of the companies are reporting, across the commodities, where they’re buying them from, in what volumes, to what extent they’re certified or not, who their suppliers are. None of that level of transparency exists in this system, so we give failing grades for almost all the companies in terms of their basic transparency. And without that transparency, we can’t even have a conversation about whether or not they’re really being sustainable. So, companies can make those kinds of commitments, and they can do pilot projects, and they can highlight those projects on their website, but at the end of the day, if they’re not telling us who they’re sourcing from, if they’re not telling us in what volumes
– source democracynow.org