Introduction
There is a great need for increased investment in the world’s agricultural systems. Private investment in farmland can yield significant economic, social and environmental benefits, but only if done properly. In the absence of global legislation, voluntary reporting is necessary.
This reporting framework for responsible agriculture reporting and its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), supported by the Swiss Development Cooperation intends to become the first hub for collecting and synthesizing voluntary reports from farmland asset owners and managers. The purpose of these KPIs is: To provide a framework for regularly and consistently collecting and publishing voluntary information from farmland asset owners and managers to disclose information on the human and environmental impacts of their activities to investors, the public, governments and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs)
The vision of this initiative is to become the trusted go-to destination for information on responsible private farmland investing, including environmental and social impacts. This will serve farmland managers and owners wishing to benchmark their performance against their peers, institutional investors wishing to assess potential and existing investee performance, governments in allowing new farmland investments to take place in their countries, and non-governmental organizations wishing to understand what the advocacy and support needs are.
No such information hub currently exists for private farmland investing. However, similar initiatives exist in terms of the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) for listed stocks. The objectives are therefore: First to develop a standard voluntary reporting framework, which companies can use to report to the managing organization; Second, to synthesize this data so that there is no attribution to individual companies, and to publish the results regularly. Reporting companies may wish to disclose their report, but this is entirely their choice; third, continually improve the reporting framework, through annual reviews, data collection, synthesis and publications.
The initiative aims to become financially self-sustaining through payments for full reports and data sets. A membership system will also be established whereby members get access to the reports and data sets.
[Read more at: http://responsible-agri-investments.com]
