Public pressure has prompted nine out of ten of the world’s biggest food and beverage companies to improve their social and environmental policies, says Oxfam Canada. There were major strides in improving policies on land, women’s rights and carbon emissions but overall the ten companies moved too slowly as a group according to Oxfam.
“Justice for everyone”
“Oxfam is working to ensure food justice for everyone around the world–for producers and consumers, the 140 million people that are going hungry every day, but also looking at the system more generally,” says Lauren Ravon, senior policy advisor at Oxfam Canada.
“Behind the Brands” was a campaign Oxfam launched one year ago, urging ordinary people to use social media to put pressure on big companies to change some of their practices.
The campaign ranked the “Big 10” food companies on the strength of their policies on transparency, women and other workers, farmers, land, water and climate.
Food companies make billions daily
“These 10 big food and beverage companies all together make a billion dollars a day,” says Ravon. “This is a really powerful group of companies and what we’re seeing is that they have huge role in the entire food system because they source from developing countries. They are involved in food production in most countries in the world.”
Oxfam campaigned for the chocolate giants Mars, Mondelez and Nestle to improve their policies to help end inequality for women farmers and it reports that the companies did.
Dramatic improvements
Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and ABF were exhorted to change their policies to help stop land grabs whereby investors take over land from small farmers. Oxfam reports “Coca-Cola moved quickly to dramatically improve its policies.”
It adds in a news release, “Some companies showed courageous leadership but it appears other need to be pulled along kicking and screaming.” Oxfam said the success indicate that public pressure does work. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people responded to calls that they use social media to contact the companies and demand change.
A detailed ranking of the ten companies and their performance on different areas of concern is posted on line.
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