Rural livelihood & sustainability

If you decide to improve rural livelihoods as a way of enhancing your company’s sustainability performance, there is a lot you can do and achieve.

Stable, sustainable conditions for rural livelihoods and surrounding areas are of great importance in any agro supply chain to ensure high-quality, stable and sustainable agro supplies in the long-term. Improving farm communities is part of many sustainability strategies of international firms but remains challenging.

Wageningen University & Research can help you reach your goals and gain competitive advantage.

WUR has economic, social, environmental & technical expertise for enhancing sustainable rural livelihoods in various agro sectors.

Prosperous farmers, families and communities

Our sustainability management cycle has five steps that can bring you closer to your sustainability goals. Whether you focus on deforestation, battling illegal work practices (e.g. child labour and underpayment), improving farmer safety on plantations or providing training and education to families and communities, we have a multi-disciplinary team to support improvement.

We can give you recommendations for your future activities by:

laying out a customised, concrete and feasible strategy and intervention plan
monitoring and implementing incentives
evaluating outcomes and impact

We can support you in various sectors on all continents

We work in various supply chains (e.g. cocoa, coffee, tea, soy, palm coconut, fruits & vegetables, dairy, and aquaculture) on three continents (Africa, Latin America and Asia) to measure and monitor progress and to address feasible interventions for the good of farm communities, the environment and companies.

Our Baseline Assessment and Due Diligence on rural conditions (farm incomes, labour conditions, good agricultural practices) will provide you with refreshing insights on the steps you can take yourself and with partners to achieve your goals. In this way, we can help you to make your agro supplies sustainable.