In the third section of just-food’s management briefing looking at sustainable sourcing, Ben Cooper asks whether discussion of the role genetic modification (GM) plays in the soy sector is a critical debate or a distraction from more important sustainability issues around deforestation and its consequences.
The role genetic modification (GM) plays in agriculture and should or should not play in the future – in particular in relation to productivity and global food security – is a live issue across many commodities and none more so than soy.
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US pressure group, the Non-GMO Project, includes soy as one of its “high-risk crops” along with crops such as canola, corn and sugar beet, all of which are predominantly GM in the US. In addition to identifying crops which are likely to be GM, the Non-GMO Project also points out the food additives and ingredients likely to be made using GM crops, which include products such as aspartame, ascorbic acid, vitamin C and citric acid, high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrins, molasses, monosodium glutamate, sucrose and textured vegetable protein.
In Europe, retailers in particular have felt the need to label their own-label products as GM-free and a significant market in GM-free soy has been established.
To say GM is a contentious issue would be a considerable understatement. Across the world, activists, academics, those representing the biotech industry and advocates for agroecological approaches to agriculture are embroiled in a lobbying war of attrition which shows no sign of abating. The soy sector is a theatre of that war, with debates over the use of soy in food and feed for animals which then enter the human food chain at a constantly high pitch, notably in the UK, within EU institutions and increasingly in the US.
However, as fevered and ubiquitous as the GM issue is, the soy sector and its stakeholders – including the major food companies which buy soy in enormous and increasing quantities – are grappling with the broader sustainability debate, focused mainly on the impact that the expansion of soy as a commodity has had on deforestation.
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By GlobalDataAlong with palm oil, the expanding cultivation of soy has been generally acknowledged as a principal driver of deforestation. As concerns have escalated, demand for certified sustainable soy has also grown.
This year has been a notable one in the context of debates around the sustainability of soy and concerted efforts to mitigate the environmental impacts of arising soy production, with the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS), a multi-stakeholder initiative, including many major food retailers and manufacturers in its membership celebrating its tenth anniversary.
The Round Table on Responsible Soy
Formally established in 2006, the RTRS launched its first sustainability standard in 2010, with the first RTRS-certified soy reaching the market in 2011. Last year, the RTRS registered the purchase of over 1.3m metric tons of certified responsible soy, representing almost 50% growth from 2013 and a record high for the organisation. The RTRS has a stated goal to reach 10m tonnes of certified soy by 2017.
Reflecting once again the growing attention being paid across the agri-food sector to sustainable sourcing, RTRS membership also registered its sharpest increase last year since 2010, with 29 new members joining.
At its tenth annual conference last month, RTRS president Olaf Brugman spoke of the risk producers had taken in order to ensure there would be a sufficient supply of RTRS-certified soy, and said sourcing commitments of certified soy are now “in balance with supply” and that there was also “sufficient supply potential to satisfy new and much higher buying commitments”.
New soy guidelines from the Consumer Goods Forum
Meanwhile, the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) launched its Sustainable Soy Sourcing Guidelines in July 2014. The CGF has made a public resolution to achieve net deforestation by 2020 and described the launch of its soy guidelines as “another important step” towards achieving that goal.
The guidelines set out a “stepwise approach” to CGF members for sourcing deforestation-free soy, comprising: conducting a materiality assessment to determine the appropriate scope of the soy sourcing policy; developing soy sourcing policies that seek transparency along the supply chain and support the production of deforestation-free soy; disclosing company policies, goals and progress that support deforestation-free soy in their individual supply chains; and setting out their own requirements, which may include higher standards than the minimum recommended in the CGF guidelines.
With the CGF identifying deforestation as the overriding priority, the guidelines do not include any recommendations or stipulations regarding GM. The only mention of GM is in the context of the three certification schemes which they detail, namely ProTerra, RTRS and International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC). It points out that of these only ProTerra has a non-GM stipulation. The RTRS offers a sustainable certification for both GM and non-GM soy.
While Brugman said in his address to the RTRS conference that the organisation was the “only global, multi-stakeholder forum with a credible standard, for GM and non-GM soy, that is connecting various partners in the supply chain”, opponents of GM would firmly reject the idea that GM soy is a sustainable option.
Other than to set out the criteria of the three schemes, the CGF does not recommend any one over another. Once again underlining zero deforestation as the primary goal, it simply states: “These three mechanisms are sufficient to verify low risk of soy contributing to deforestation as defined by The Forum’s sourcing guidelines and meet the goal of helping to achieve zero net deforestation set forth in the resolution.”
While acknowledging that public concern around GM represents an important issue for CGF members, particularly in Europe, CGF sustainability director Ignacio Gavilan defends the organisation’s neutral position on GM, and points out that the soy sector offers a good illustration of successful segregation. “We don’t take a position on GM or non-GM. We look at it from the deforestation point of view. Some of our members use it [GM], some don’t but it provides a good example of how to segregate supply chains.” The soy sector, he says, has been “segregating the supply chain [between GM and non-GM] successfully”.
In terms of multi-stakeholder efforts to make the soy supply chain more sustainable, Gavilan observes the moves around palm oil are more advanced with regard to “critical mass and the sophistication around certification” than soy. This is partly due to the fact the RTRS was launched three years after the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), but this also offers one advantage. “I think they are watching RSPO and learning from the mistakes,” Gavilan says.
Gavilan also suggests the RTRS’s efforts have been helped by more governmental support, notably in Argentina and Brazil.
Consumer concern
Within the debates over the sustainability of commodities such as soy, cocoa and palm oil, much is made of the importance of consumer sensibilities. Transparency is a constantly discussed issue. Consumers must be fully informed about the constituent ingredients in the foods they eat. Meanwhile, public opinion has been a critical catalyst for positive change in agriculture, most vividly demonstrated by the growth in certification programmes such as Fairtrade, UTZ and Rainforest Alliance.
Gavilan’s remarks about successful segregation and the RTRS’s provision of certification for both GM and non-GM underline that the sector wishes to remove the GM issue at least from the deforestation debate.
The scientific debate over GM continues to rage. Industry stakeholders maintain that the media response tends to be sensationalist and leads to a disproportionate distrust of GM products. This has led European retailers in particular to opt for a cautious stance. Some in the food industry believe this is “giving in” to the public hysteria, which is fuelled by very vocal – and adept – campaigning by anti-GM activists. Retailers argue that the concerns of their customers are paramount.
Whether or not the arguments of anti-GM campaigners have scientific validity, the debate has been running for years and shows no sign of coming to any sort of decisive conclusion in the near or medium term.
In the meantime, public perceptions – whether misguided or justified – remain a fact of life for food producers and retailers and GM will therefore remain a key issue shaping how companies approach their soy supply chains.
As Jerry Houseago, business development director at Cert ID, which provides food certification services to food companies and performs much of its work in the non-GM sector, observes: “Consumers are people. Not every decision that a consumer makes is rational or scientifically based and that will never change. We’ll always have differences of opinion about it [GM] and therefore people will want to know about the root issues. Consumer choice means telling people about what the product is and letting them make their choice because in the end the market decides.”
This article is part of just-food’s management briefing on the latest developments in the sustainability of supply chains for four key commodities: palm oil, cocoa, soy and sugar.
For more on why there has been a step change in industry engagement on cocoa, click here.
To read why some in the industry believe the drive on sustainable palm oil has been to slow, click here.
