2 September 2015
Duncan Brack, Chatham House
This paper explores the potential for governments to use public procurement policy to reduce deforestation, including drawing lessons from timber procurement policies. It suggests that this approach could be well suited for some commodities and could help to spur further private-sector action.
As the public sector is a major purchaser of food and catering services for schools, nurseries, hospitals, care homes, canteens, prisons and the military, public procurement policies in this area clearly have the potential to promote the uptake of sustainable products not associated with deforestation.
Many public authorities, particularly at local and regional level, already have a procurement policy for food; in principle, criteria for sustainable production could be incorporated relatively easily.
Some products – particularly palm oil, cocoa, coffee and tea – are better suited than others to this approach; for all these products, voluntary certification initiatives currently under way could provide identification mechanisms on which procurement policies could rest.
Other commodities may not be as suited to procurement policy, and it may be more effective to use other regulations; this applies particularly to soy, for which biofuel regulations are likely to have a bigger impact.
In cases in which private-sector initiatives are under way to achieve 100 per cent sustainable imports (such a target has been set for palm oil in several countries), procurement policy may be unnecessary. In other cases, the adoption of a new procurement policy could serve as the spur to a private-sector initiative.