Five more schemes offering responsible soy to the European feed market have passed the independent benchmarking process against the FEFAC Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021, announced FEFAC and ITC. The new schemes are ADM Responsible Soy, Amaggi Responsible Soy, ASC from Aapresid, PROFARM Production Standard from Food Chain ID and ProTerra Europe.
Following the first wave of schemes that successfully passed the benchmarking process in June 2021, there are now twelve schemes that are compliant with the FEFAC Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021. Compliance with the FEFAC Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021 means that the schemes meet
the criteria for responsible soy production that are included in the FEFAC Guidelines, which were developed in an effort to set a transparent “comparison level” for European compound feed manufacturers requested to source responsible soy.
All twelve benchmarked schemes also complied with the new specific desired criterion on conversion-free soy, meaning they can offer responsibly produced soy grown on land that didn’t come at the expense of any (illegal or legal) conversion of natural ecosystems (including natural forests) as from a certain cut-off date (2020 as the latest possibility). In the meantime, several other responsible soy schemes and programs have applied for benchmarking against the FEFAC Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021, which is currently being facilitated by ITC.
FEFAC president, Asbjørn Børsting, said that “FEFAC is pleased to see the strong response and interest of scheme owners to include the new desired criterion on conversion-free soy, which is considered as a key market driver in Europe for sustainable soy value chains. The growing access to the market offer on conversion-free soy from robust and verified certification schemes is essential to the European feed industry’s capacity to market demand and political expectations on deforestation & conversion-free supply chains.”
An overview of all the schemes that are compliant with the FEFAC Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021 is available on the FEFAC/ITC Soy Benchmarking Tool.
