Nestlé has joined more than 40 food and agriculture organisations in announcing its support for the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform’s Regenerating Together Programme (RTP), a new initiative to help scale regenerative agriculture practices across global food supply chains.
The RTP has been developed in collaboration with farmers, agronomists, academic institutions, non-governmental organisations and industry representatives, and seeks to provide a framework offering ‘practical implementation guidance, transition support and new protocols to help improve consistency, credibility and transparency in how regenerative agriculture practices are adopted and verified across supply chains’, Nestlé said in a statement.
Common standards
The RTP will seek to address one of the key challenge facing regenerative agriculture at present – a lack of common standards and approaches across food supply chains.
Environmental organisations including the Earthworm Foundation and The Nature Conservancy have also backed the rollout of the initiative, which follows on from more than four years of cross-sector collaboration across the food and agriculture sectors.
During the development of the RTP, some 23 pilot projects were conducted across 23 farming systems in 25 countries, to test and refine the framework under different agricultural and environmental conditions.
‘Great potential’
“Regenerative agriculture shows great potential to strengthen supply chain resilience against climate change while helping improve farmers’ livelihoods,” commented Pascal Chapot, VP head of agriculture at Nestlé.
“To accelerate adoption, we need practical and credible frameworks that can be consistently applied across the value chain. SAI Platform’s Regenerating Together Programme is a significant step forward, helping to simplify implementation, build trust and support meaningful impact at scale.”
Nestle added that it is ‘committed to advancing regenerative food systems at scale’, and has pledged to source 50% of its key ingredients from farmers adopting regenerative agriculture practices by 2030. Read more here.
Read more: LEAF CEO David Webster on the scaling potential of regenerative agriculture
