Smallholders Representation Working Group Update – March 2020

Smallholders Representation and Capacity Building (SCB) Working Group:

The Project Management Subgroup has officially commenced its activities with a kick-off meeting and two preparatory sessions, setting the groundwork for project evaluations. The GPSNR Capacity Building website has been updated with data from projects up to Quarter 3 of 2024, providing members with the latest insights. This month, 10 Cambodian members were approved, with an onboarding call scheduled to welcome them, and the Smallholder pre-GA webinar took place on 18 November 2024 to support engagement ahead of the General Assembly.

The Secretariat continues to support registered smallholders in the lead-up to the General Assembly, with 9 Ivorian, 5 Thai, and 2 Indonesian smallholders currently awaiting membership approval. Ongoing capacity-building projects are being actively monitored and managed, including Phase 3 of the Indonesia GAP Project, where Koltiva is revising its training materials for smallholders based on valuable feedback received.

Shared Responsibility Working Group:

To further the work on the Shared Investment Mechanism, the Project Management subgroup has approved the Project Evaluation Criteria document and will start to evaluate projects to ensure conformance with GPSNR’s requirements for capacity building projects. The subgroup will continue to review project proposals and aims to have all proposals reviewed by mid-February.

On Value Transfer related tasks, the Executive Committee’s value transfer task force met for a first meeting to discuss the next steps, agreeing that the mechanism should reward smallholders who have already put sustainable practices in place. Value transfer task force is developing a series of simple indicators that can showcase improved smallholder performance, and ways that smallholders can support this with evidence. Further discussions will continue in December. 

The Member Consultation period for the proposed GPSNR Policy Components and Baseline Reporting Requirements closed on 3 July 2020. All comments received as part of the consultation exercise were discussed by the Policy Toolbox Working Group over several rounds of calls. There has also been healthy dialogue between various membership categories and the Working Group on the alignment of the Policy Components. 

Meanwhile, pilot testing for the Baseline Reporting Requirements is in progress, with 10 GPSNR member volunteers participating in the exercise. The Secretariat will be interviewing each of the volunteers in the coming weeks to gather feedback on their experience in submitting the Baseline Reporting Requirements data. More updates will be shared in due course.

At this stage, finalized versions of the Policy Components and related documents have been submitted by the Policy Toolbox Working Group to the Executive Committee for review and further discussion at the Executive Committee level. The Policy Components will then be brought to the GPSNR General Assembly for voting.

The formulation of Policy Components is a critical piece in fulfilling GPSNR’s vision of a fair, equitable and environmentally sound natural rubber value chain. 

All GPSNR members, at the time of joining the Platform, committed to this very vision, as well as 12 principles of sustainable natural rubber as defined by GPSNR. The Policy Components were developed to provide more specificity to the 12 Sustainable Natural Rubber Principles. Within the proposed Policy Components are key commitment details to no deforestation/ conversion/ degradation, upholding human rights, supply chain transparency and monitoring and reporting. 

If approved, the Policy Components will act as a clear and guiding framework for GPSNR company members to establish or update supply chain commitments through their natural rubber purchasing policies. 

Adopting a policy allows a company to signal that the issues covered by the policy are important to the company, and that resources and capacities will be dedicated to addressing the issues in order to comply with the policy. Policies, while illuminating the goals that a company is working towards, also enables these commitments to be channelled upstream to suppliers and downstream to buyers, with the potential to transform the entire supply chain.

Following the Policy Toolbox Working Group’s observation that common questions and concerns were raised by GPSNR members during the Members Consultation period, the Working Group has developed a supplementary FAQ document to provide detailed responses to address these concerns, in a bid to provide greater clarity on the Policy Components. These will be circulated to the GPSNR membership in August, along with all other proposed resolutions.