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A Ugandan organic farmer hand-pollinates vanilla flowers. In addition to spices, Uganda exports organic coffee, cocoa, cotton and fruit. |
Environmental Sustainability (MDG 7)
To reverse the loss of environmental resources, greater emphasis is required on safeguarding natural resources and on ‘agro-ecological’ practices for agricultural exports. The thriving European Union and United States markets for organic food and fibre products present lucrative opportunities for developing countries to diversify exports towards higher value-added natural and organic products and to secure a larger market share. ‘Organic’ farmers receive better prices, reduce their exposure to pesticides and contribute to a cleaner local environment. However, stringent quality demands, high certification costs, and lack of market information and marketing savvy make entering the most promising markets difficult.
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Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda
Working with policy-makers, trade support institutions and several thousand farmers to export organic products
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Eastern and Southern Africa
The benefits of organic farming safeguarding the livelihoods of 22,000 Africans ITC’s work on promoting environmentally friendly products like organic food involves examining the interface between climate change and trade. In 2007, ITC took the debate forward in two areas – organics as a tool for mitigation of climate change and adaptation, and the ‘food miles’ issue.
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Greening Your Business
This issue focuses on trade and the environment. The aim is to encourage you, our readers, to think about becoming environmentally sensitive in your international business development practices.
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Think twice before buying supplies that are environmentally unsustainable. Above, a deal to buy environmentally certified wood. |
Environmental Competitiveness: “Green” Purchasing
Consider environmental issues in procurement to reduce total costs and make your enterprise more competitive.
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Paper: consider the environmental pluses and minuses as a packaging material. |
Making Your Packaging Environmentally Friendly
Historically, packaging was mainly used to transport goods, particularly foodstuffs, from their place of manufacture direct to the customer. Packaging later became prominent in the preserving of food products for longer periods. The packaging revolution has continued, catering to an ever-expanding range of consumer products that are sold through ever-widening chains of distribution.
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Packaging: Towards a Sustainable Future
Packaging is a vital sector of most national economies. It consumes large quantities of resources. Because of packaging’s often limited life span, these resources (of materials and energy) are viewed in some quarters as being wasted. As a result, there is increasing pressure to minimize packaging volumes and make it reusable, or at least recyclable to recover materials or save energy. Growing realization of the need to plan for a sustainable future is creating the climate for an era of dramatic change in this industry.
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Environmental Trade Barriers: Who Wins, Who Loses, What’s the Score?
Environment and trade is a challenging issue that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has to tackle. The scarcity of statistically well-grounded information makes the task even more complex. Using market analysis tools developed by ITC with data derived from the United Nations COMTRADE database and UNCTAD’s database on trade barriers, a pioneering study to be published later this year tries to put some figures into the debate.
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Sustainable plantation of fast- growing eucalyptus trees in South Africa. |
Certification: Helping Markets Support the World’s Forests
Voluntary forest management certification and associated wood labelling schemes are becoming accepted as a way to help markets contribute to the conservation of tropical and other types of forests.
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Certification Concepts Defined
- Sustainable forest management is “the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfil, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions, at local, national and global levels, and that does not cause damage to other ecosystems”. (Definition of the Helsinki Declaration of the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe, 1993.)
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Retailers Favour Certified Products
The world’s major retailers of wood products are increasingly adopting policies which favour certified wood products, and are communicating their policies more explicitly.
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