Regenerative Supply Chains: No Retrofit Needed
A Conversation Between Christopher P. Skroupa, Skytop Editor-in-Chief, and Scott Poynton, Founder & CEO, The Pond Foundation / April 11th, 2022
Scott Poynton is an Australian forester. He founded The Forest Trust (TFT) in 1999 and grew it into a global non-profit working in 48 countries, impacting more than $1 trillion in supply chain transactions.
Scott supported some of the world’s largest companies to be more environmentally and socially responsible. He brokered major transformations across the wood and agri-commodities sectors, pioneering responsible sourcing and launching the world’s first No Deforestation, No Exploitation commitments.
In 2020, Scott founded The Pond Foundation. Its My Carbon Zero program helps individuals and businesses take their own strong, credible climate action. He also leads A Different Way Limited, supporting C-suite executives and their organizations to grow values-based leadership while sharing the lessons of his experience through writing, presenting and lecturing.
Christopher Skroupa: Supply chain is the topic taking headlines these days. Given Russia’s actions, do you believe that countries will pull back on cross border dependencies?
Scott Poynton: No, not at all. I think it will focus minds more sharply on risk and mitigation. We’ve become way too sanguine about risk as global supply chains became superefficient at moving raw materials and products from distant nooks and crannies in every corner of the globe. Businesses have made way too much money through cross border trade to pull back from it. Russia’s actions, COVID and associated supply chain disruptions are a wake-up call demanding that we be collectively smarter around managing supply chains and their inherent risks.
Christopher: Describe your project in Africa. How does it involve supply chain management?
Scott: I’m working with a Singaporean food-tech startup called WhatIF Foods. Our project in Ghana is all about setting up a completely new supply chain for an agricultural commodity that’s never been exported at any scale. It’s called Bambara groundnut and it’s grown predominantly by women smallholder farmers across the Sahel region in West Africa. The project goes beyond the traditional supply chain management roles of buying, QC, and shipment. We’re looking to build a regenerative, 21st century supply chain to support the farmers’ livelihoods, get carbon sequestered back into their soils (insetting) and develop socioeconomic infrastructure in the communities that grow the crop. The ‘21st century’ part means we’re exploring what we can do with technology, including with blockchain, but also that we’re bringing in the best research and respecting the farmers’ dignity.
Christopher: What is different about supply chains today than 50 years ago? Tools? Technologies?
Scott: Well, sadly, in too many cases, not much. By that I mean that many companies just buy, sell, and pay little heed to their business impact. It’s a trading, supply chain approach that’s decades if not centuries old. It’s why farmers around the world are desperately poor and why workers so often work in slavery or at least forced-labor conditions. We do have more technology available for traceability and to identify human rights and environmental abuses, but too few companies avail themselves of the opportunity to use it. We have no end of certification schemes, which are excellent tools for greenwashing the grim malpractices we like to think no longer exist. We have multimillion dollar communications budgets to tell good stories, but nowhere near enough genuine change throughout global supply chains. There’s too much turning a blind eye despite grand policies to the contrary.
Christopher: What is “getting the right process right” all about? What is the right process? But, then, what is getting it right?
Scott: “Getting the process right” ultimately means getting what you need delivered to you on time, at the right price, at the right quality where ‘quality’ is defined more broadly than a technical specification. ‘Quality’ must be much expanded to include the values that underpin the supply chain and whether there are positive outcomes from the business. Too often we think that ‘do no harm’ is good enough but it isn’t. You might not be doing direct harm to a poor farmer, but over generations, your trade has crushed them down into desperate poverty through annual cuts to prices. Global supply chains can be designed to enhance human dignity and human rights. They can lead to positive livelihoods for all engaged. They can create positive environmental impacts. It’s way too rare that that’s what happens; it’s no coincidence that so many in the global South hate the notion of ‘globalization.’ But it needn’t be that way. Getting it right means going in with humility, not assuming you’re the savior to help poor people to a better life. That’s the outcome you want, but you create it through dignified partnerships with everyone in your supply chain. Getting it right means not going in with maximum efficiency as your goal. It means listening, watching, feeling, and asking yourself sharp questions at every single step, “What might be the perverse impacts of what we’re doing here, in this moment?” Getting it right means iteratively moving forward with your eyes and your heart wide open, focusing beyond questions of price and focusing on your planetary impact. Are people benefitting from this supply chain? What about the environment? Getting it right means not drinking the marketing Kool-Aid. “We built a school” is meaningless if the children are too poor or sick to attend, or if there’s no teacher to teach. Look at what you’re doing from the lens that there must be some negative impact here, somewhere, and turn over every stone and change what you’re doing until you find it’s OK, that positive impacts are flowing from your engagement. Getting it right means being human and treating everyone, including the planet, with dignity.
Christopher: How can this project be of service to supply chain managers?
Scott: I’d like to think we can test things here and share what we learn. This is a real, commercial supply chain. It’s not an aid project, it’s not CSR, it’s not a simulation. It does aim to be regenerative for communities, the environment and everyone in the supply chain; it must work for the company, the communities and the planet. The big opportunity here is that it’s totally new. That means we don’t have to retrofit solutions onto bad practice. We can take all the ideas and latest supply chain thinking of what it means to ‘get it right’ and strive to implement them from Day 1, Farmer 1. We will mess up. We will stumble. But if we’re up to the task, we’ll learn and go again. It’s a living experiment designed to explore what’s possible in a deeply challenging context. If we can get it right here, we stand a chance of getting it right elsewhere. Sharing the intricacies and challenges of that journey can help others setting up new supply chains but also those with big retrofitting tasks too.
