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CSRwire, The Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire
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Catherine Mentior
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Nestle reports progress on farm animal welfare nestle.com
Nestlé has reported progress on its 2014 targets for the responsible sourcing of dairy, meat, poultry and eggs as the company works to further improve animal welfare in its supply chain.
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Peter Burgess
Peter Burgess
Founder/CEO at TrueValueMetrics developing Multi Dimension Impact Accounting
WOW ... impressive ... what a lot of words.
I am a voracious consumer of economic and corporate communications, and at the same time a long time observer of the socio-enviro-economic system we all inhabit. I have been doing this for about half a century since I left university and in many different parts of the world.
Companies are very efficient in the way they communicate financial performance to their stockholders and the capital markets. About 3 pages of numbers and a financial analyst can learn a huge amount about financial performance. Owners of stock have done very well over the past fifty years.
But when it comes to things like shared value, the efficiency of communications is near zero. The words used years ago and the words used today seem to be conveying pretty much the same message ... like ... we set ourselves some goals and we have exceeded them ... and this is pretty good. Well ... yes ... perhaps ... maybe ...
I worked in West Africa many years ago ... in the 1980s. The problem of child labor in the cacao plantations was an issue then and, surprise surprise it is still an issue more than 30 years later. The companies are doing enough to fend off the media, but they are not doing enough to solve the problem ... and in my view, they will not, until there is a strong link and quantification between corporate financial performance and corporate behavior as it impacts society and impacts the environment.
If you listen to programs like the Nightly Business Report in the USA, everything is about the profit and how stock markets and currency markets are performing. The idea that profit, social impact and environmental impact are all part of a big and complex socio-enviro-economic system that has become dangerously dysfunctional does not seem to be on the radar of their writers.
Big companies like Nestle now understand the need to talk about this complex issues, but they have a long way to go in terms of the efficiency of communication. Bluntly put, it is impossible to figure out in a reasonable time whether or not the company is doing an amazingly good job or is merely engaging in a massive exercise in propaganda. There are numbers that we can reasonably trust about financial performance ... there is nothing like it for impact on people and impact on planet. This has to come.
Peter B
truevaluemetrics.org
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