Rainforest Alliance

What does it mean?

The Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Agriculture Standard recognizes the challenges posed by climate change and present-day agriculture practices and seeks to address these challenges by actively promoting sustainable practices and improving the resilience of farms and farming communities.

Farmers can call themselves Rainforest Alliance certified when a third-party auditor verified compliance with the criteria mentioned on the right. Currently Nedspice works together with 915 pepper farmers in Vietnam, who produce over 2200 tons combined, divided over 1513 hectares of land.

Two types of criteria

The Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Agriculture Standard consists of two categories of criteria:

• Critical Criteria:
  Farms are required to comply with all 37 Critical Criteria as a pre-requisite to certification and should remain compliant to maintain their certification. Critical Criteria establish the baseline and cover the highest-priority and highest-risk environmental, social and labour issues. Examples of Critical criteria are GMO-free crops, access to drinking water, no forced labour and fraud countering measures.

• Continuous Improvement Criteria:
  In order to remain certified, farms must demonstrate an increasingly higher degree of compliance with the Continuous Improvement Criteria over time. The standard recognizes that sustainability is a path, a process over time, rather than a final or fixed destination. The Continuous Improvement System contains criteria orientated around the following areas: native vegetation, wildlife management, soil and water conservations, water quality, integrated pest management, waste management, energy and greenhouse gas emissions and living wage.