The Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) has launched the Our Supporting Sustainable Rubber campaign in effort to ramp up sustainability standards within the rubber industry. PEFC held an online webinar to officially kickstart the campaign yesterday, in which several interesting pieces of information were revealed:
Problems faced by rubber smallholders are essentially: (1) price volatility; (2) low productivity; (3) unsustainable practices; and (4) compliance issues. To that end, PEFC is a key partner in an initiative with the UN-REDD Programme to develop a sustainable forest trade certification framework, with its pilot project already ongoing in the Lower Mekong region in Thailand.
The Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR) is looking to create a risk-based platform that would allow certified companies to assess its sustainability standards against the standards recommended by the GPSNR. The platform was led by tire companies as an alternate (non-certification?) approach. The International Rubber Study Group (IRSG) also has a self-declaration approach to rubber sustainability.
There was a point made about the increasing global demand for traceability, and that it may be more beneficial to view the requirement of traceability as a tool to improve sustainability practices rather than to reveal good and/or bad practices in itself. Panellists also noted that there is also a lot of work that still needs to be done to identify pertinent sustainability issues, especially when it comes to social issues such as equality of pay.
Edit (08.07.2021, 12.50 p.m.): Edited to include last two sentences in point 2.