Developing environmental standards for food

People in the US and Europe consume vast quantities of chocolate every year, and the raw material needed to fuel this addiction is the gourd-like cacao pod—each one yields enough cocoa for about seven milk chocolate bars. Cacao is an important cash crop, especially for small-scale farmers in West Africa. But cacao plantations have led to the extensive clearing of tropical forests in cacao-producing countries.

If you want to buy forest-friendly chocolate, you can check the packaging for sustainability logos or labels. But the standards behind those labels are voluntary and typically adopted by the most sustainable producers. That’s a problem, says Jason Clay, head of WWF’s Markets & Food program, because “we discovered that the bottom—or least efficient—10% or 20% of producers of food commodities produce about 60% to 80% of the environmental impacts.”

So Clay is developing Codex Planetarius. Inspired by Codex Alimentarius, a set of health and safety standards for foods that nearly every country follows, this planet-focused system would set mandatory minimum environmental standards for sustainability in agricultural commodity production and push the lowest-performing producers to improve. “If the world can adopt standards to protect human health and safety,” Clay says, “why can’t we do the same for the health and safety of the planet?”