CorporateResponsibility.Net

An interesting post on the Cadbury takeover by Kraft:

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Over the weekend, The Guardian carried an article about Kraft’s purchase of Cadbury.  The first three paragraphs were telling, and damning:

Kraft has promised to honour Cadbury’s current deal to sell Fairtrade chocolate after fears that it would stop selling ethically-sourced confectionery if its takeover goes ahead.

Jonathan Horrell, the UK corporate affairs director for the US food conglomerate, said Kraft already worked “extensively” with sustainably sourced cocoa and coffee suppliers and planned to maintain Cadbury’s contracts with the Fairtrade Foundation.

But he would not confirm whether Kraft would continue Cadbury’s ongoing talks to expand its use of Fairtrade cocoa beans into other brands – a major and continuing worry for the Fairtrade Foundation.

When I first read this article, I was furious.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.sustainabilityforum.com/blog/cadbury%E2%80%99s-melted-down-profit-nothing-else

A really good blog post from Wayne Visser.

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Why has CSR failed so spectacularly to address the very issues it claims to be most concerned about? This comes down to three factors – the Triple Curse of Modern CSR, if you like:

Curse 1: Incremental CSR

One of the great revolutions of the 1970s was total quality management, conceived by American statistician W. Edwards Deming, perfected by the Japanese and exported around the world as ISO 9001. At the very core of Deming’s TQM model and the ISO standard is continual improvement, a principle that has now become ubiquitous in all management system approaches to performance. No surprise, therefore, that the most popular environmental management standard, ISO 14001, is also build on the same principle.

There is nothing wrong with continuous improvement per se. On the contrary, it has brought safety and reliability to the very products and services that we associate with modern quality of life. But when we use it as the primary approach to tackling our social, environmental and ethical challenges, it fails on two critical counts: speed and scale. The incremental approach of CSR, while replete with evidence of micro-scale, gradual improvements, has completely and utterly failed to make any impact on the massive sustainability crises that we face, many of which are getting worse at a pace that far outstrips any futile CSR-led attempts at amelioration.

Read the complete post here:

http://www.csrinternational.org/?p=3431

This is an entry from my blog. I thought it might be a CR news item as well.

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Yesterday I came across the latest CSR/Sustainability Review from Cadbury in the UK. You know, Chocolate, etc…..
They had a history of good reporting so I thought lets take a look and do a review.
The first thing I noticed was the web address: http://www.DearCadbury.com. Sounds interesting… Sounds very engaging. Good start. Read more

Source: FabianPattberg.com

Companies weren’t even thinking about eco-strategies thirty years ago. Coverage of environmental issues was so scarce that if there was an article in the newspaper, I would cut it out.  Today, you can’t read the news, listen to the TV or scan a blog that doesn’t have a “green” story.

The environmental community and business leaders didn’t used talk to each other. There was debate among environmentalists about whether to work with business. As the years passed, the conversation started to include the need for environmentalists to get on corporate boards in order to influence corporate environmental practices.

Read more

Source: The EcoInnovator