ABSTRACT
The Chairman of Wilmar International, a global palm oil company, took action after his company was accused of links to fires in Sumatra that caused a choking haze across SE Asia. The children of the President of a very large forest management company came home from school one evening with questions for their father. The statement became the company’s guiding principles, and the FSC process became the means to verify whether the company was managing its forests accordingly. Let’s return to Nestlé for a moment. In November 2009, months before Greenpeace launched its KitKat campaign, Nestlé’s Chairman had strongly stated in a public presentation that the company wanted no link to deforestation in any of its products. The open source process requires deep reflection and, for company leaders, a really in-depth look inside themselves to touch who they really are, what they, at their deepest core. Transparency begins with ‘Traceability’, or mapping the supply chain to a raw material source.
