BACP focused on four key themes for transforming commodity agriculture

Land Planning & HCV Management

In order to prevent the expansion of commodity agriculture into existing natural habitat and to ensure that areas of high biodiversity are preserved, better land and development planning, and improved management of areas with high conservation values is essential.

Working with Smallholders

Given their large contribution to supplying global commodities, the certification of smallholder farmers is particularly important in the context of BACP’s work to transform commodity markets toward more biodiversity-friendly production. Globally, smallholders represent over 90% of cocoa production and 30% of palm oil production. Improving the ability of companies and certification bodies to work with smallholder farmers is critical to a sustainable future for commodity agriculture.

Training and Capacity Building

Training and capacity building efforts, of everyone from smallholder farmers to company concession managers to round table staff to policymakers and ministers, were at the heart of the BACP portfolio; they were the main mechanism by which grantees were able to remove policy barriers, reduce information gaps, support better production practices, and increase awareness of the importance of biodiversity for sustainable commodity production.

Impact Assessment

Agriculture is believed to be more damaging to nature than any other sector of human activity. Sustainability standards seek to mitigate these impacts through improvements at the farm and landscape levels, as well as transformation of broader market and governance systems. But standards are only as good as the monitoring and impact assessment methods they use to track progress and compliance. BACP’s focus was on voluntary sustainability standards, including the commodity roundtables (e.g., RSPO in palm oil and RTRS in soy), third-party standards (e.g. Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade), and to a lesser extent, internal company standards and other codes of conduct such as principles for sustainable finance.