The meeting is part of the protocol that establishes the governance structure and presents the progress of the project. In addition, the Conscious Origin Chile program and the experience of the sustainability standard for the Dairy Consortium were announced with the participation of its Manager; Octavio Oltra.
On October 20, the Trade Association of Processors and Exporters of Dry Plums of Chile (Chileprunes), through a protocol meeting, established the presentation of the governance to promote an APL plan (Clean production actions that measure social benefit and greenhouse gas reductions) in order to establish a sustainability standard to deliver an international certification to companies in the sector.
In the words of the project manager and executive director, Pedro Acuña: “the idea is to generate a support program to close gaps related to the established standard, thus certifying an important group of companies in the sector.”
The project will be divided into four stages: development of the standard, audit, training and certification; It contemplates an implementation of 28 months, and in its projection to date it has already carried out the official start-up; a mapping of actors; a survey to prioritize areas and the formation of governance bodies.
The Committee was attended by Pablo Campino, Jesús De La Riva, Hugo Poblete and Matías Aninat from Chileprunes. Karina Orellana, Francisca Sepúlveda and Fernando Barrera from IICA. Macarena Espinoza from PASO, Johanna Guzmán and Dominique Naves from ASSC and the special participation of Octavio Oltra; Manager of the Dairy Consortium, who gave his views on the benchmark for validation of international standards.Thanks to the case of the dairy world, it was possible to make a comparison of the technical processes where the pillars of sustainability were highlighted. Each one with its own development logic that entails different types of certification through scores, as well as the development of tools that speed up the evaluation processes.
For Octavio Oltra “more than a differentiating issue, the field of sustainability is no longer seen as a competitive advantage (at least in the dairy sector) but rather it is the standard that allows me to compete in different markets today. So that makes it a more pressing issue in our case. And I think that also for many sectors of the food industry.”
Finally, the Committee established the short-term actions, highlighting the month of November as the deepening of the benchmark and the elaboration of the sectoral diagnosis on the item of dehydrated plums and December for the consolidation of the benchmark and the six-monthly work.
