Natural Rubber Supply Chain comes together to build unique sustainability assurance benchmark

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Natural Rubber Supply Chain comes together to build unique sustainability assurance benchmark 

Singapore, 20 June 2024: Members of the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR), who represent almost 60% of the value chain, have agreed on an industry wide assurance system in an Extraordinary General Assembly held yesterday. Through this agreement, the natural rubber industry now has a standardized stage-by-stage process through which companies can commit to, implement and verify strong sustainability standards and practices in their operations. 

GPSNR members’ stage-by-stage progression towards verified sustainability assurance 

The Assurance system is currently being piloted by some volunteer manufacturers and processors until August 2024. Concurrently, three of its four mandatory elements have also been put up on a public consultation to seek comments and additional inputs that will help finetune the different aspects of the model. The feedback collected via the pilots and the public consultation will be integrated into the assurance model and put up for members’ review at the Annual General Assembly in October 2024. By 2025, all GPSNR members will be using this model in their operations. 

The model covers four mandatory elements – an Assurance Assessment checklist which will spell out the minimum requirements that members will have to meet on all aspects of the GPSNR policy framework, an Assurance Protocol which will provide guidelines to external assessors, a Remediation Protocol that includes actions and timelines to close the gaps identified by the assessors and a Members Journey or broad timeline to achieve these requirements.  Additionally, the model also includes supplementary tools that will support members in putting the assurance model into practice, like a due diligence framework and national risk assessments, amongst others. 

‘’Having a system that can verify and cross check the implementation of our members’ commitments has always been our overarching goal at GPSNR. With the voting in of the Assurance Model structure, our members have demonstrated their intent to deliver on their sustainability promises. I am especially proud of the multistakeholder nature in which the assurance model has been agreed on, keeping in mind the practical position of each member category.’’ said Stefano Savi, GPSNR’s Platform Director. 

GPSNR’s membership is meeting next week in Singapore to iron out the details of the minimum requirements spelt out in the Assurance Model checklist, the nature of the claims that can be made, the feedback from the pilots and the assurance protocol for third party assessors. 

END

About GPSNR: 

GPSNR is an international membership driven platform set up to define sustainability for the natural rubber value chain. It brings together various stakeholders to a common ground based on fairness, equity and environmental sustainability. More on sustainablenaturalrubber.org

For more information, please contact:

Bani Bains

Communications Manager

Email: bani.bains@gpsnr.org

Ph: +65 97268165

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Stretching the conversation about sustainable natural rubber

By 2050, the number of cars in the world is expected to more than double as urban population growth and rising incomes lead to increased demand for mobility. This has led to louder calls for a more environmentally friendly, energy efficient transport sector.

But what’s been missing from the conversation on sustainable transport so far is a key material that cars and other vehicles literally run on: rubber.

Around 70 per cent of the world’s supply of natural rubber is used to manufacture the wheels that move cars and enable airplanes to take off and land. In the last two decades, the consumption of natural rubber, which is primarily produced in the world’s tropical regions, has been increasing at a steady rate of 5 per cent every year.

Ideal climate and soil conditions in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam have made Southeast Asia the epicentre of global rubber production. Ninety per cent of the 13.960 million tonnes of rubber tapped last year came from this part of the world. The last 10 years have also witnessed the expansion of industrial rubber practices in Cambodia and Laos, after land in China and Vietnam began to deteriorate as a result of large-scale rubber production.

On a recent trip to Bintan, an Indonesian island located an hour from Singapore’s shores, Eco-Business got a first-hand look at the reality of smallholder rubber farming in Asia and the challenges of charting a sustainable path for rubber.

Although natural rubber has not received as much attention as fellow tropical commodity palm oil, it creates a similar set of social and environmental problems, from contributing to rapid deforestation to a history of land grabs and human rights violations in the Mekong.

However, unlike palm oil, which is mainly produced in large estates owned by big, family-owned corporations, close to 85 per cent of global rubber is produced by smallholders in Asia, making traceability a major issue in the industry’s quest for sustainability.

“Natural rubber is a crucial element of tyre production, driving the importance of its sustainability,” William Dusseau, manager of technical relations at Cooper tyre and rubber company, told Eco-Business. “A coordinated, universal and standard industry approach is the way to drive solutions in establishing and promoting sustainable natural rubber practices.”

He added that the launch of the Global Platform on Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR), which took place last Thursday at the World Rubber Summit in Singapore, was a significant step in developing and maintaining sustainable rubber standards.

Members of the new platform include major brand tyre companies such as Cooper, Michelin, Pirelli, and Bridgestone and global car manufacturers including BMW Group, Ford Motor Company and General Motors.

GPSNR also includes international non-profit and civil society organisations such as Mighty Earth, Birdlife International and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

According to Jean Bakouma, head of the Forest Program at WWF-France, since the rubber value chain is primarily driven by buyers, tyre manufacturers hold the greatest leverage for improving both the socioeconomic and environmental performance of natural rubber production.

“A robust sustainability policy that is thoroughly implemented by tyre manufacturers must consider sustainable natural rubber as a natural and responsible way to protect forests with high conservation value and high carbon stock, as well as foster other environmental services,” he said.

GPSNR Staff March 27, 2019

Empowering Smallholder Farmers: The Path to Deforestation-Free Rubber Supply Chains to Meet the EUDR

On Wednesday, 19 April 2023, the European Union approved the upcoming Deforestation-Free Regulation (EUDR) to prevent companies from placing products linked to deforestation onto the EU market. As part of the wider vision of the EU Green Deal, it will demand companies who import rubber or rubber-based products (e.g., tires) to verify that their supply chain is deforestation-free. It’s a push towards an era of environmental accountability, yet it also sparks debates about the path forward for the rubber industry.

The EUDR requires companies to have traceability to the farm level, including geo-location data and proof of land legality. According to the regulation, every plot below 4 hectares requires at least a GPS point coordinate, while plots above 4 hectares must have a polygon.

Fulfilling these traceability requirements is no small feat. There is concern from the industry that smallholder farmers may be unintentionally excluded from global sustainable supply chains. Ensuring smallholder farmer inclusion requires a holistic sustainability approach.  There is no doubt that the rubber industry has begun moving towards sustainable rubber sourcing through combined industry efforts like the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR). However, the reality is that most imported rubber to the EU currently does not meet the regulatory requirements as the industry lacks traceability to the farm level. As 85% of the global natural rubber supply is supplied by approximately 6 million smallholder farmers, the implications of this regulation could be far-reaching and severe, particularly for these smallholder farmers.

However, there is a lot of hope.

Firstly, even though it might seem challenging, traceability to the farm level is doable – even for the rubber industry. This has been demonstrated in a GPSNR-funded farmer training and coaching project primarily focused on supporting smallholders to apply Good Agriculture Practices (GAP). Koltiva, the company I am working for and who was selected to be the implementing partner for this project, has mapped more than 4,000 farmers and their farms to help them to prepare for the EUDR in less than a year.

Secondly, we believe that traceability to the farm is scalable. In our work with clients in 51 countries, we were able to map almost 1 million smallholder farmers through our KoltiTrace platform. Platforms such as KoltiTrace allow companies to map and verify their supply chain, including transaction traceability from Seed to Tire and deforestation-free analysis.

Finally, EUDR could have a long-term positive impact on smallholder farmers. Currently, many rubber farmers do not have proper land titles. Due to the EUDR geolocation requirements, many smallholders will, for the first time, have access to a map of their own plantation, allowing them to legalize their land.

And it doesn’t stop there. Smallholders have largely been invisible in global supply chains. Traditional development programs have tried to engage them, but they have not reached the expected results. Many smallholders still have no access to knowledge, no access to capital,  and soon will also be excluded from the carbon economy.

I believe that it’s possible to bridge these gaps. Traceability to farm level and digitalizing the first mile of agricultural value chains can lay the foundation for holistic sustainability interventions. Enabled by technology and data, the sector can equip farmers with critical knowledge, improve their access to finance, actively support farmers to apply low-carbon practices and enable them to reap the benefits of the growing carbon economy.

While traceability cannot be achieved overnight, the rubber industry is in a unique position. At GPSNR, the major industry players are sitting at one table. Through combined efforts and data-sharing agreements of shared supplier data, the rubber industry can become a leading example of how to meet the EUDR.


About the Author:
Luca Fischer is Koltiva’s Program Manager, leading Koltiva’s boots-on-the-ground implementation projects in the rubber sector globally. He bridges the gap between the client, product, and field teams.

Luca has over five years of work experience in sustainable sourcing, smallholder livelihood, and climate-smart agriculture development. He graduated with an M.Sc. in Sustainable Resource Management from the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

About Koltiva (click here for more information)
Established in 2013, Koltiva is a leading agritech company for enterprises to make their global supply chains traceable, inclusive, and climate-smart. Backed by Koltiva’s human-centered technology with boots-on-the-ground professional service, Koltiva supports some of the largest multinational companies by digitizing and verifying global supply chains, focusing on enhancing traceability, inclusiveness, and sustainability. Koltiva combines triple-tech (AgriTech, FinTech, and ClimaTech) to improve producers’ outcomes and profitability while building more sustainable supply chains.

GPSNR Secretariat July 4, 2023

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