Press Release: GPSNR General Assembly 2021

Share This Post

PRESS RELEASE


In new industry agreement, Global Natural Rubber companies will report annually on their sustainability progress

 

Singapore, 15 December 2021: Members of the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR) convened their annual General Assembly, which saw the approval of a set of detailed sustainability reporting parameters that all members will be required to complete annually from 2022 onwards. This will standardize sustainability reporting in the natural rubber industry, as many GPSNR member companies have already included strong sustainability commitments  in their natural rubber production and procurement policies.  

As GPSNR member companies account for about 50% of global natural rubber volume, their ability to transparently report on the same sustainability standards will aid a structural change in the industry to ensure harmonised sustainability reporting becomes the norm. 

“This is a tremendous milestone for the Platform and for the natural rubber industry. In our third annual General Assembly, we have moved further towards developing a model that helps our members ensure that their products and services are delivered in alignment with GPSNR’s principles, and can be monitored for continuous improvement. The reporting requirements have been agreed upon by upstream and downstream industry stakeholders as well as civil society players to ensure accountability. This serves as a testament to our model of driving sustainability, equity and fairness through multi stakeholder collaborations.’’ said GPSNR Director Stefano Savi. 

GPSNR’s third virtual General Assembly drew more than 120 attendees, including members of the Platform, partners and invited guests. In addition to voting on resolutions like the reporting requirements, GPSNR members also elected representatives to the 2021-2022 Executive Committee, which comprises representatives from each of the membership categories. 

Access the reporting requirements here. 

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

 

More To Explore

13 Global Tire Companies Co-Invest to Deliver Healthcare to 1,800 Rubber Farming Households in Côte d’Ivoire

Groundbreaking GPSNR initiative with social enterprise Elucid targets the overlooked link between farmer health and supply chain resilience

SINGAPORE, 23 April 2026:  The Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR) today announced a three-year partnership with Berlin-based social enterprise Elucid to deliver healthcare access to 1,800 rubber farmers and their households. This will benefit approximately 9,000 individuals  in Côte d’Ivoire. The initiative is funded through GPSNR’s Shared Investment Mechanism (SIM) by 13 tire and rubber companies: Aeolus Tyre Co., Ltd., Apollo Tyres Ltd., Balkrishna Industries Ltd. (BKT), The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Hankook Tire & Technology, Kumho Tire Co., Inc., Maxxis International, Nokian Tyres plc, Prometeon Tyre Group, Sumitomo Riko Company Limited, Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd., Toyo Tire Corporation, and The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd.

The partnership addresses a gap the industry has long overlooked: the direct impact of farmer health on supply chain productivity. Medical emergencies cost Côte d’Ivoire an estimated 853 million USD in cocoa exports in 2017 alone. With many farmers cultivating both cocoa and rubber, the implications for the natural rubber sector are significant. Research from Ghana  shows that enrollment of farmer households in national health insurance increases their agricultural investment in several areas by approximately 40%, according to a 2024 study published in Agricultural Finance Review.

“We talk constantly about improving yields and farm management practices, but we’ve missed something fundamental,” said GPSNR CEO Stefano Savi. “A farmer who can’t afford to see a doctor when they’re sick or who cannot go to the farm because their child is unwellcan’t be productive. Healthcare isn’t separate from supply chain resilience. It’s central to it.”

A Critical Gap for the World’s Fourth-Largest Rubber Producer

Côte d’Ivoire is critical to global rubber supply chains, yet smallholder farmers who drive production across the country’s forest regions face severe healthcare barriers. The country ranks 187th out of 195 globally for quality of care, and only 32% of essential medicines are available in the public health sector, according to a 2020 health systems assessment. While two-thirds of the population are enrolled in the national health insurance scheme (CMU) on paper, fewer than 4% actually used their insurance card in 2025, due to administrative hurdles and facility-level barriers.

When farmers lack reliable healthcare, medical emergencies force them to sell assets and abandon farm improvements — a direct risk to the supply chains that depend on them.

A Comprehensive, Four-Part Approach

The initiative combines four components:

  • Enrollment in CMU national insurance for all participating farmers and households
  • Elucid’s emergency and essential care scheme covering WHO-accredited medications and life-saving services
  • Quality improvements at 15 healthcare facilities serving the target communities
  • Community awareness programs connecting health to economic wellbeing

Elucid’s digital platform will track all data in real time, enabling transparent impact reporting throughout the project. The program aims to increase healthcare visits from fewer than 200 to over 1,800, drive CMU enrollment from less than 30% to over 90%, and prevent more than 150 catastrophic health expenditure events each year. Half of beneficiaries will be women and 20% will be children under 18.

“This is about demonstrating what’s possible when the private sector invests in making national health systems work for farmers,” said Sambhavna Biswas, Partnerships Manager at Elucid. “This model can be replicated across rubber-growing regions and adapted to other agricultural sectors. Everyone in the value chain benefits when the people at its foundation are healthy and economically secure.”

Farmer enrollment begins in August 2026, with healthcare access improvements continuing until  January 2029. From December 2027, the project will transition toward long-term sustainability, building cooperative capacity to maintain health support for their members.

About GPSNR: The Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber is a multi-stakeholder initiative bringing together tire manufacturers, vehicle makers, natural rubber processors and traders, and civil society organizations to develop and implement sustainability policies and practices across the natural rubber value chain. More on sustainablenaturalrubber.org

About Elucid: Elucid is a Berlin-based social enterprise providing data-driven healthcare services for farmers and workers in global supply chains across six countries and five agricultural sectors. Learn more at www.elucid.social

Media Contacts: GPSNR: Bani Bains | bani.bains@gpsnr.org;

 Elucid: Sambhavna Biswas | sambhavna.biswas@elucid.de

GPSNR Secretariat April 23, 2026
News

Continuing the Conversation with GPSNR Topic Talks – The Sumatran Rubber Pilot

The GPSNR Topic Talks webinar series is organised by the GPSNR Secretariat and presented by GPSNR members. The webinars cover several themes around sustainability and the global natural rubber supply chain.

The Topic Talks series continued on the 17th of March with Dr. Michael Steuwe from WWF US and Gerald Tan from HeveaConnect presenting on the Sumatran Rubber Pilot.

The Sumatran Rubber Pilot (SRP) is a voluntary, self-financed collaboration of rubber supply chain players and technical experts interested to facilitate the production and trade of transparent and sustainable natural rubber. The participating processing mills, tire makers, civil society organisations, technology providers and financial institutions have three major objectives:

  • Demonstrate how rubber’s downstream can work together to make its upstream more sustainable.
  • Identify, test, evaluate, and report on what it takes to achieve, and how to pay for transparent sustainable natural rubber supply chains.
  • Develop “Proof of Concept” approaches from and for GPSNR discussions on policy requirements and implementation, transparency and traceability, capacity building, and shared responsibility.

Within a few months of the project launch in July 2020, SRP’s four rubber processing factories, managed by the Halcyon Agri and ITOCHU groups, had traced up to 1 year of rubber supplies to the village and/or sub-district of origin based on self-declarations by their supplying dealers. These approximate origins of the rubber sources were filtered through WWF Indonesia’s new environmental risk assessment and management tool which identifies High Conservation Value Areas and High Carbon Stock Forest for the whole island of Sumatra. The results allow processors and their respective downstream supply chains to focus their sustainability work with farmers on priority areas.

The SRP partners are enhancing dealer self-declarations with digital apps such as CropIn and Hamurni to assess farms’ potential environmental, social, equity, labour and legal issues accurately and to address them.

As GPSNR adopts principles and criteria for what constitutes transparent and sustainable rubber, the risk assessment algorithms will be adapted to flag compliant rubber accordingly. This is increasingly important for rubber’s downstream as companies’ Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) impacts are becoming key evaluation criteria for investors and financiers who will demand the disclosure of the relevant information. In a parallel development, new supply chain laws will require major companies like the world’s car and tire makers to be responsible for the environmental and social impacts of their supply chains. The collection and analysis of detailed data on upstream supply chains will have to become an essential part of doing business and SRP partners are working to respond appropriately to these changes.

While continuing to focus on increasing the resolution of tracing rubber to its origin and collecting the respective data, SRP will now begin finding ways to best address the social, equity, labour, and legal issues that may have come up in supply chain assessments. 

The SRP is a voluntary, open and flexible platform of like minded partners interested in testing a diversity of approaches to achieve supply chain transparency and sustainability, and welcomes interested rubber supply chain actors to reach out and discuss how they might join the collaboration. GPSNR members interested in participating in the SRP should reach out to the GPSNR Secretariat to get involved in the project.

GPSNR Staff March 30, 2021
Scroll to Top