Food companies are some of the most invested in tackling human rights abuses across their supply chains, a new ranking has showed. However, the results also showed the industry was still “moving slowly” on human and labour rights.
Companies in the food and agriculture products sector – including Unilever, PepsiCo, Tesco and Marks & Spencer – received some of the highest scores in the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Corporate Human Rights Benchmark, which analyses corporate human rights of 127 consumer goods giants across the globe.
Out of the top 10 spots, six were companies operating in the food and agriculture products sector.
But despite its good performance, more than half of the companies in the sector still scored below 20% overall in the annual ranking determining how invested businesses are in driving progress.
The scores were measured against five different criteria: governance and policy commitments, embedding respect and human rights due diligence, remedies and grievance mechanisms, practices, and responses to allegations.
Top scorer Unilever was the only company to fall in the 50%-60% score band. It performed particularly well in terms of embedding respect for human rights in company culture and management systems.
“We are pleased that following the assessment of the World Benchmarking Alliance, Unilever again ranks first in the 2022 Corporate Human Rights Benchmark,” a spokeswoman said.
“We also recognise that more needs to be done to increase all company scores – including continuing to make progress on our own – and importantly to deliver progress on the ground to address ongoing endemic human rights issues in global value chains.”
As part of its endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, it released a Human Rights Report in 2020 as well as supplier audit update report, setting out key strategies to tackle potential human rights abuse in areas such as discrimination, forced labour, and land rights.
In an example of how it improved efforts the past year, Unilever recently started helping smallholder cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast – where it sources much of the ingredients for its ice creams – to formalise the rights to their land through an affordable land tenure documentation process.
M&S, Coles, Diageo and The Hershey Company all featured in the top 10, though none managed to score higher than 40%.
The WBA said this year’s research showed “clear signs” that holding companies to account on human rights helped drive faster progress.
However, it also showed that some companies were still lagging to bring human rights responsibilities to the board level and stakeholder engagement – more than a third of companies (36%) still scored zero on human rights due diligence.
Some of the food & drink companies that performed poorly in comparison with the likes of Unilever and M&S included Kraft Heinz, Associated British Foods, Carlsberg, Costco and Amazon.
“This benchmark shows that while some companies have made human rights a priority, driving important progress, others are severely lacking and moving very slowly,” said the WBA social transformation lead Namit Agarwal.
“A decade after the UN Guiding Principles were established, their impact on the ground is very limited.
“It is high time that companies take serious actions to implement their commitments.”
The WBA noted that a third of all surveyed companies included major human rights issues like child labour in their supplier codes of conduct and contractual agreements, but only 2% of them actually assessed how many people were affected by those issues in the supply chain and then disclosed progress.
Of all the companies that improved the most on human rights due diligence since last year, 75% had a process in place at board level to address human rights issues. On the other hand, 70% of the companies that scored zero on human rights due diligence did not.
This is the fifth iteration of the WBA’s annual corporate human rights ranking. Since the first one in 2017, 66% of food and agricultural products companies have improved their scores.
Other surveyed sectors included automotive manufacturing and ICT manufacturing.
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