GLOBAL – Rainforest Alliance turns 20

NEW YORK – The Rainforest Alliance, a leader in the sustainable certification of agriculture, forestry and tourism operations worldwide, marked its 20th anniversary this week, announcing that sales of Rainforest Alliance Certified sustainable coffee, bananas and chocolate surpassed $1 billion in 2006. The New York-based international nonprofit organization cited sustained, rapid growth of its coffee, forestry and other current certification programs, and announced it would create new certification programs in strategic sectors, such as livestock and biofuel crops.
Twenty years after its founding in 1987, the Rainforest Alliance is working with thousands of producers, from small cooperatives to Fortune 500 companies including Kraft (coffee), Chiquita (bananas), Expedia (sustainable tourism), Goldman Sachs (green building and sourcing) and many other household names. It creates billion-dollar impacts on global markets, moving them toward sustainable practices. The Rainforest Alliance has currently certified some 10,000 farms in 14 countries on 600,000 acres of land, benefiting more than a million farm workers and their families, as well as certifying more than 110 million acres of forestland.
The Rainforest Alliance is an external, third-party, voluntary certification regime. It works with nonprofit partner groups to create rigorous, independent standards for environmental and social sustainability, including habitat and ecosystem conservation, reforestation, integrated pest management, worker protection, access to medical care, education, community investment and much else. Producers that meet the standards obtain Rainforest Alliance certification and market their products as such.
Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee purchases have doubled each year since 2003 (from 7 million to 54.7 million pounds in 2006). The Rainforest Alliance projects certified beans will account for 5 percent of the world coffee supply in five years. Rainforest Alliance Certified bananas are currently 15 percent of the global market. In January 2007, forestlands certified by the Rainforest Alliance as meeting Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards surpassed 100 million acres, about half of the global FSC total, and a nearly 50 percent increase over the previous year.
The pace of major new deals is also accelerating. So far this year alone the list of new Rainforest Alliance partners includes McDonald’s UK (the first major UK retailer to source 100 percent Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee, 1.8 million pounds in 2007), Holiday Inn hotels in the US (1,000 hotels, 55,000 cups of Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee daily), Whole Foods (carrying Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee, bananas and chocolate at Whole Foods Market stores throughout the US and Canada), Mars, Inc., and even Spain’s premier art museum the Prado (building its new extension with 70 percent FSC-certified wood).
Beyond its current certification programs in the agriculture, forestry and tourism sectors, the Rainforest Alliance also announced this week it will create new certification programs for sustainable cattle ranching and the sustainable production of soy, palm oil, sugar and other biofuel crops. It will also develop a new Climate Change Initiative to certify carbon offsetting projects and protect vast tracts of forest that will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.