Sustainability reports from the food industry: case studies from Europe and Latin America

Abstract

Sustainability reports, as a voluntary measure of companies and organisations, are an important instrument for supporting corporate social responsibility (CSR). The most recognized guidelines for sustainability reporting are the Global Reporting Initiative Guidelines. They aim to enable a reasonable and balanced presentation of a company's performance regarding economic, environmental, and social aspects, to all stakeholders. The paper selects the sustainability reports from four companies from the food industry, two from Europe and two from Latin America. A qualitative analysis highlights to which degree sustainability reporting in Europe and Latin America shows different results.

Development of a Proposed Set of Indicators for Assessing Food Company Commitments and Practices Regarding Environmental Sustainability

“…The proposed set of indicators are drawn from, and align strongly with, other existing indicators, including the relevant GRI standards and relevant reporting frameworks [35][36][37][38] and similar benchmarking initiatives, such as those developed by the World Benchmarking Alliance, the Food Foundation and Oxfam [33,34,47]. The proposed set of indicators are tailored to the sectors on which we focused and incorporate a wide range of domains commonly identified as important for comprehensively addressing environmental sustainability.…”

“…GRI standards are designed to be used by any industry, with sector-specific standards for certain industries with a particularly high environmental impact, including agriculture and fishing. The indicators in the GRI standards were developed by consensus from a broad range of stakeholders [35,36], and are generally considered to be the de-facto international standard for environmental sustainability reporting [35,[37][38][39]. Limitations of GRI relevant to this research are that the GRI's focus on internal organisational performance largely ignores metrics related to an organisation's interactions with local ecological systems [37,40] and, arguably, discourages integrated thinking about the trade-offs between various indicators, particular where there may be conflict between financial, social and environmental performance [40].…”

Analysis of CSR in Costa Rica Agribusiness: Its influence on Cooperation, Innovation and Performance.

“…In developing countries, CSR reporting is more greatly influenced by the external forces/powerful stakeholders for instance, foreign investors, international buyers, international media and international regulatory bodies (Ali et al, 2017). To date, there is no country with an obligation for sustainable development reporting; nonetheless, Brazil was the leader in Latin America with 135 sustainability reports in 2010, in contrast with Costa Rica where only three reports were published, one of them by a company that produces beer, fruit-based drinks, bottled water, natural fruit drinks (Hoeltl et al, 2013). In fact, it was considered that CSR was stagnated in Central America and the Caribbean (Shah et al, 2016).…”