Soft Commodities Forum Progress Report

The Soft Commodities Forum (SCF) enables collaboration between six leading agribusinesses to identify solutions to eliminate soy-driven deforestation and the conversion of native vegetation in the Brazilian Cerrado. The Cerrado is one of Earth’s most biodiverse savannahs and home to 5% of the planet’s animals and plants.

The December 2022 bi-annual SCF report outlines the progress on this goal by disclosing improvements in traceability and deforestation- and conversion-free (DCF) performance and detailing landscape intervention strategies and an implementation framework for financial incentives for farmers aiming to influence producer behavior.

As of December 2022, the SCF has accomplished the following:

• Launch of the Farmer First Clusters (FFC) initiative, a landscape intervention strategy to preserve priority Cerrado areas, with farmers at its heart.
  • The FFC structure and implementation plan are for landscape solutions in Western Mato Grosso, Southern Maranhão, Western Bahia and Tocantins. The details of the FFC deployment approach include landscape interventions and theory of change, a governance structure led by our newly launched SCF Landscape Council, an initial budget and co-funders, a monitoring and evaluation framework, and farm-level commitments and eligibility criteria. 
• Increased visibility over indirect sourcing
  • SCF members have surpassed their initial indirect supplier engagement goal and are now working collaboratively with 14 priority indirect suppliers, including resellers, cooperatives and third-party warehouses, to establish co-developed action plans aimed at increased indirect supplier monitoring and evaluation capacity. The action plans will enable members to carry out third-party verification of the traceability of supply sourced from indirect suppliers. Additionally, we aligned on a common protocol for third-party verification of indirect suppliers, which we disclose in this report, with key milestones and targets for progress.
• Strengthening accountability processes
  • This report shows progress on data accountability by announcing that all SCF member direct supplier performance is verified through third-party auditing using a common auditing protocol, as established in the June 2022 report. We have also aligned on a protocol for third-party verification of indirect suppliers, paving the way for the upcoming comparable verification of indirect supplier performance. 
• Second disclosure of deforestation- and conversion-free soy footprint