The Global Coffee Platform (GCP) has released a revised version of the GCP Equivalence Mechanism (EM). This is an innovative building block to support the continual increase of coffee purchased that is produced following baseline principles and practices of sustainability across the industry.
The revised EM was launched in conjunction with the International Trade Centre (ITC), which comes onboard as an implementation partner for the assessment of sustainability schemes that wish to be recognised as a credible and following at least baseline practices of sustainability.
“We’re delighted to release the newly revised EM and announce the partnership with ITC. This milestone follows broad public consultation with representatives across the coffee value chain, sustainability schemes, and civil society earlier this year. With sustainability becoming a license to operate and a variety of schemes in the market, the EM fosters transparency and sector alignment at the global and local level. Our partnership with ITC enables the scale up of our work and assures the integrity of the recognition process,” says Annette Pensel, Executive Director at GCP.
The EM is a framework developed by GCP to assess whether a scheme can be considered equivalent to the Coffee Sustainability Reference Code (Coffee SR Code), a sector-wide reference on the foundations of sustainability in economic, social, and environmental dimensions for green coffee production and primary processing worldwide.
GCP’s Equivalence Process evaluates whether a sustainability scheme meets both the Coffee SR Code and a set of operational criteria including governance, standard- setting, assurance, data and claims requirements. According to GCP, this helps to ensure that recognised sustainability schemes have a credible and effective system for implementation.
“As a neutral broker of information on sustainability schemes, ITC has over 10 years of experience of successful partnerships to promote best practices on sustainability through enhanced transparency, comparability, and common language,” says Joseph Wozniak, Head Trade for Sustainable Development at ITC.
“Our partnership with GCP builds nicely on our mission to support sustainable trade practices and to ensure the integrity of the GCP recognition process.”
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