Sustainable Food Laboratory

The Food Lab's Responsible Commodities Initiative (RCI) seeks to be an objective, multi-stakeholder, fact-based resource group. Our interest is in providing tools to help system actors make better-informed decisions that support sustainable commodity markets.

Responsible Commodities

Agricultural commodities form the backbone of the global food supply. The top ten commodities provide 80% of human calories, and the economic, social, environmental impacts of commodities production are enormous. Therefore, the RCI focused first on addressing sustainability issues in palm oil, cotton, soy, sugar, coffee and other commodities through the creation of a Benchmarking Tool. The tool is designed to guide continuous improvements in the setting of uniform sustainability standards across all commodity markets. Read more about the Benchmarking Tool.

Bio-Fuels Research and Scenario Planning

Today's bio-fuel production practices can make or break the resource base of future generations, but investment funds are flowing into these products without adequate safeguards.

Bio-fuels represent a major new phase in the development of agricultural commodities. Bio-fuel crops require more than just production standards to ensure sustainability. They also require net energy balance calculations, net carbon balance calculations--both carbon to air and carbon to soil--as well as net greenhouse gas balance calculations. Since many of the first generation bio-fuel crops happen to be food crops, many people are concerned about their potential distorting effect on food markets.

Bio-fuels present a compelling investment case and hold out promise as a source of renewable energy, an alternative to fossil fuels, and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But not all bio-fuels are created equal. Different crops and production practices result in substantial differences in impacts. In order to direct investment funds to bio-fuel projects that will hold the most potential, the industry needs to understand and make decisions based on these differences. This information is important not just to farmers but also to the investors, policy-makers, and corporations that are driving the rapid increase in bio-fuels.

The Sustainable Food Lab is seeking financial support that will enable us to complete a comprehensive assessment of the most likely sources of bio-fuels. We propose a research effort that will identify the key issues both within commodities and across commodities, so that useful comparisons can be made about both the costs and benefits of producing bio-fuels from different agricultural crops.

Read our proposal: Toward a Sensible Bio-Fuels Future