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The common framework for responsible purchasing practices is a reference point to support companies to engage with stakeholders and take practical action to improve their purchasing practices, creating an enabling environment for better labour standards in their supply chains.
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Common Framework for Responsible Purchasing Practices in Food
Using a common language of five principles of responsible purchasing, ETI is promoting responsible practices across all of our sector groups:
- Common framework for apparel and textiles
- Common framework for food
- Responsible purchasing practices in manufacturing initiative
Companies should consider their purchasing practices as part of their human rights due diligence.
A company’s every-day purchasing practices have significant influence on the conditions for workers in the supply chain. Short-term planning, last minute changes in orders, inaccurate forecasting, pricing below production cost and late payments can all have negative effects on the management of orders and financial stability of suppliers. This in turn can lead to issues related to excessive overtime, low wages for workers and excessive use of temporary labour. These issues can be exacerbated, as purchasing practices cascade and pressures compound along the length of the supply chain, increasing the risk of severe exploitation.
Investing time and resources into reviewing and improving purchasing practices and building a partnership approach with suppliers can have significant benefits to businesses, including a more stable and reliable supply chain and efficiency gains through better communication, planning, and purchasing processes.
Industry, business model, supply chain, size, operational context, ownership and structure all influence buyer-supplier dynamics and risks to workers, meaning responsible purchasing practices (RPPs) cannot be ‘one-size-fits-all’. Companies have a responsibility to undertake human rights due diligence, seeking to understand how their own commercial behaviours relate to the risks in their supply chains and take corrective action accordingly. Whilst a nuanced understanding, driven by engagement with buying teams, suppliers, workers and their representatives, is key to developing RPPs, there are overarching themes that apply to a range of sectors and supply chains.
The common framework for responsible purchasing practices:
The common framework provides an outline of RPPs, to support companies to engage with stakeholders and take practical action to create an enabling environment for good labour standards in their supply chains. It breaks down the broad subject of purchasing practices into five overarching principles, a ‘common language’ by which to structure effective implementation.
The original common framework was developed by the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI),Ethical Trade Norway, Fair Wear, the German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (PST), and the Dutch Agreement for Sustainable Garments (AGT), for the apparel and footwear sector. It was based on an extensive benchmarking of literature on RPPs, collating the themes and content to produce the ‘five principles’, and involved wide stakeholder consultation.
Following further consultation, ETI developed the common framework for RPPs in food, amending the ‘practices’ under each principle, to be appropriate to the food industry. The industry includes many varied product types, sectors and processes, for which ‘responsible purchasing practices’ may vary (e.g. fresh produce, smallholders, seafood, commodities etc). This framework acts as a core reference document, to provide a common language and structure for discussion and action, after which guidelines for different elements of the industry may be developed.