ZOOM
Prof. Dr. Andrea Lenschow, Osnabrück: "Governance für nachhaltige Güterketten in der Landwirtschaft am Beispiel des Sojahandels zwischen Brasilien und Europa"
The massive expansion of soy production in Brazil, dedicated for export largely to Europe and China and used mostly for animal feed, has contributed to a loss of access for local communities to land and water, particularly in highly dynamic frontier regions in the Cerrado. Soy certification standards like the multi-stakeholder Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) contain principles that are supposed to prevent such problems. Yet, auditing practices are not effective in protecting the rights and access of local communities to land and water due to three inter-related sets of factors: 1) the business-dominated nature of the drafting and content of the RTRS standard, 2) the structural limitations and everyday practices of auditing, and 3) domestic and local contextual factors in Brazil and western Bahía. New approaches are required to govern global commodity chains in a more environmentally just way. In the second part of the talk I will look at recent legislative proposals in Europe (EU and some member states) to govern global commodity chains with the aim to protect both the environment and human rights in the producing countries and ask whether and how they may fill some of the gaps left by private and multi-stakeholder governance.