Social sustainability in today's food system

While some well-established and numerous new labels promote environmentally sustainable standards in the agriculture and food sector, our food system struggles with establishing social requirements and criteria. At a recent webinar, four expert speakers from research, associations and industry shared very different perspectives on how social requirements can be defined, measured, certified, and combined with existing sustainability schemes.

During the webinar, Janina Grabs, Professor of Business and Society at the ESADE Business School in Barcelona, talked about social sustainability of deforestation-free supply chains and focused especially on the need to address trade-offs between social and environmental sustainability.  Noah Ramos, Representative Social Responsibility at BioSuisse, explained how BioSuisse is integrating social sustainability into their certification and what the challenges are in combining certification organic and social standards. Eva-Marie Meemken, Professor of Food Systems Economics and Policy at ETH Zurich, discussed the need to measure the impact of social sustainability standards to see if they have the desired outcome. Further, Aline Roth, Project Manager Sustainability at Coop, showed how social sustainability is intergraded into Coop's sustainability strategy and highlighted the importance of transparency in value chains as a basis for social and environmental commitment.

In the subsequent panel session, more than 90 online participants were able to engage in lively discussions with the experts.

We thank the four experts for joining us and sharing their perspectives. We also thank the Swiss Society for Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Sociology (SGA) for jointly organizing the event with us.