As the realities of the drought in South Africa’s Western Cape region continue to emerge, UK importer Worldwide Fruit is seeking answers through a partnership with three UK retailers and their South African growers, to better understand water vulnerability risks.
A research project involving British research institutions and South African experts in water use in agriculture will join Worldwide Fruit for a workshop in the Western Cape, which will follow a similar one scheduled to take place in Tzaneen.
The two workshops in the north and south of South Africa are to discuss the matter with suppliers of Worldwide Fruit and other suppliers to Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose.
Worldwide Fruit says its objective has been to gain a deeper understanding of where water vulnerability risks exist within its supply chains and to get to know the ways their growers are already seeking to mitigate these risks.
“We have worked with our strategic partners around the globe and our supply chain self- assessment approach was designed to collaborate with our partners. This has produced excellent project participation,” says Tony Harding, technical and procurement director of Worldwide Fruit.
“Our business relationships extend to and operate and function across multiple countries and regions,' Harding continues. 'As a result our strategy has an unavoidable exposure to a multitude of regulatory, political, social and cultural realities, all of which we seek to consider, accommodate and respect. Our strategy, very specifically, requires the involvement of, and the engaging with, the many farmers that represent the source of the produce we sell to our retail customers.”
Worldwide Fruit says each farmer exercises often unique and/or individually tailored approaches to setting goals, making decisions and managing inputs and resources such as water as they farm.
Harding notes that farm level sustainability is a controversial subject, as it is difficult to define with any precision, but also brings with it fundamental ethical challenges such as how trade-offs between different sustainability elements be handled, whose view of sustainability should be adopted and how different interpretations of sustainability should be resolved. “What exactly are we seeking to sustain? Who will benefit and so forth,' he outlines.
He says there is a lack of uniformity at farm-level which has to also be adequately acknowledged and suitably responded to in the company’s own strategy, approach and engagement.
“Our project was not necessarily science-based, but rather designed as a ground-up approach,' Harding explains. 'Our learnings have come from the realities as told by our grower partners on a daily basis.”
Willie Wood, head of technical at Worldwide Fruit, says a wealth of insight has come from some very honest conversations with the group's partners.
'Some of our grower partners are grappling with water shortages whilst their neighbours may not being dealt with quite the same situation,' says Wood. 'We soon saw that the situation was much more complex than we had realised.
“We believe collaborative work has allowed us to gain a more balanced and deeper understanding of the resilience of our grower base and this in turn has brought our customers closer, more aware of what has been a very fast changing picture.”
Worldwide Fruit will host a workshop on the subject on 8 June 2018 in Stellenbosch at the Institute of Natural Resources, an applied research unit based in Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, in conjunction with UK-based Cranfield University, the University of East Anglia and Oxford University.
This forms part of the project ‘Increasing resilience to water-related risks in the UK fresh fruit and vegetable system’ which the organisers hope will make for a very interesting and productive industry day.
Leading speakers will be David Farrell, a founding partner of Bluenorth, a specialist consulting practice that supports businesses in the agricultural and food sectors in the proactive clarification development and implementation of sustainability strategies, as well as Profesor Wiehann Steyn, programme manager for crop production at Hortgro Science.
