Tell Procter & Gamble and its top shareholders to end deforestation!

Procter & Gamble is the world’s largest consumer goods company. It has a long history of destroying and degrading forests from Borneo to the Boreal. Last year the company’s shareholders voted overwhelmingly for the company to halt these practices.

We need your help to make Procter & Gamble honor its promises.

Comments

Dear Fund Manager,

Late last year 67 percent of Procter & Gamble’s shareholders urged the company to eliminate deforestation and intact forest degradation from its supply chain – the highest vote for a shareholder resolution on deforestation in history. As you know, it was Procter & Gamble’s sourcing of virgin wood pulp from the Canadian Boreal forest and its sourcing of palm oil from suppliers responsible for the devastation of rainforests of Indonesia that prompted shareholders to call on the company to increase the scale, pace and rigor of its efforts to address deforestation.

P&G has begun to develop an action plan in response to the shareholders’ mandate, but the wording of the shareholder resolution left a lot of latitude for what the company can do, and we’re worried that P&G will not take all the steps necessary to address the scope of the problems. NGO advocacy groups continue to demand a suite of actions by P&G to end ties to logging of Caribou habitat, destruction of tropical rainforests for palm oil and violations of Indigenous People’s rights, as well as effective and transparent monitoring and independent verification mechanisms to enable third party validation of its claims of progress and sustainability. It is also crucial that P&G go beyond its current reliance on certification schemes, as it has been amply demonstrated that these schemes, while they may provide a starting point for sustainability efforts, are insufficient to deliver comprehensive solutions.

In order to eliminate forest destruction from its products, P&G needs to establish and enforce a set of mandatory requirements, harmonized across its business, to achieve an effective cessation of deforestation and forest degradation for paper in the boreal and palm oil across the humid tropics. P&G’s action plan must include a commitment to establish a non-compliance protocol. The protocol must include a clear commitment to identifying and suspending non-compliant suppliers, including those that continue to convert high carbon stock rainforests and high conservation value areas to palm oil, or to log, or source, wood pulp from critical caribou habitat.  P&G must commit to engage directly with communities in its supply sheds that have serious human rights grievances and seek their inputs to its action plan.  P&G must work with human rights experts and rights holders to establish verification mechanisms to ensure that its suppliers can prove that they have fulfilled their requirement to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ and communities’ rights to give or withhold Free Prior and Informed Consent to operations on their lands.  P&G must also demonstrate a willingness to play a leadership role in advocating for change and a transformation of the pulp and paper and palm oil industries, so that the best practices of business tomorrow go well beyond the unsustainable practices of today.

We are therefore writing to urge you to maintain engagement and keep a continuous eye on P&G’s development of its action plan and the implementation of its new deforestation mandate. Forests stretching from Indonesia to the Canadian boreal, and all who rely on them, depend on you to do what is in your power to urge P&G to respond positively and productively to the resolution and meet the demands expressed by NGO advocates who continue to act in a good faith effort to make this company a true leader in sustainability.

If sustainability is a journey, we need you to ensure that P&G moves quickly and in good faith to take the journey as far as it can go.

Thank you,
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