Developing Sustainable Wildflower Harvesting for Global Supply Chains

This project aims to develop and promote best practice in sustainable harvesting within the South African wildflower industry - a sector supplying high-value, ethically-sourced bouquets to UK and South African high street retailers and supermarkets - with positive outcomes intended for both environmental and socio-economic aspects of ethical wildflower harvesting. As a Knowledge Exchange project, the work will be conducted in collaboration with the Flower Valley Conservation Trust (FVCT) - a Western Cape NGO at the vanguard of sustainable harvesting. The FVCT has piloted an innovative programme of work, which seeks to achieve conservation goals through the development of market opportunities. The FVCT is located in the Cape Floral Region of the Western Cape of South Africa, which is the smallest and richest of the world's six floral kingdoms. The main vegetation type is known locally as fynbos ('fine leaved bush'), which has been harvested from the wild for many decades because the distinctive appearance of the flowers has proven popular with consumers. Large quantities of fynbos are exported every year from the Western Cape to European markets, with UK high street retailers and supermarket chains being the most significant customers. However, unsustainable harvesting of wildflowers is one of the threats to the biome and the fynbos industry has been loosely organised and weakly regulated. In environmental terms, this has led to excessive pressure being placed upon the resource base, as marketable species have been exploited beyond their capacity to reproduce. Given the UK's commercial influence, stakeholders in this country have a responsibility to co-develop more sustainable harvesting practices. The project sets out to develop the work of the FVCT and to promote the cause of sustainable harvesting in both South Africa and the UK through a set of progressive and applied mechanisms.

Opportunities for devising mechanisms for ensuring the integrity of the sustainable harvesting programme and improving stakeholder outcomes will be met through four inter-connected work packages. Work Package 1 develops audit methodologies to enable the effective monitoring of sustainable picking practice and landscape management. Work Package 2 develops training materials and programmes in order to improve the skills, opportunities and socio-economic gains of a culturally-diverse harvesting workforce. Work Package 3 develops a better understanding of how sustainable harvesting in horticulture fits into the wider context of ethical consumerism in South Africa as well as in the UK. Interview-based and focus group methods will trace consumers' ethical values and decision-making in the context of their everyday lives and purchasing practices. This will not only construct useful marketing knowledge for the FCVT and its commercial partner, Fynsa, but will also provide a pilot study of ethical consumption in the global South of interest to transnational corporations, NGOs and labour unions working in this area. Work Package 4 promotes the sustainable harvesting agenda to a wide set of stakeholders through three 'Learning Events'. Two workshops will be held in Cape Town to stimulate debate around the viability of biodiversity-business initiatives and the institutional structures required to initiate and sustain them, and to showcase the outputs from the project. Finally, the project impacts will be communicated to the corporate responsibility community in the UK through a presentation to the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), whose membership includes the majority of high street retailers and supermarkets chains, including key buyers of fynbos.

The project will have a wide series of impacts, ranging from local-level improvements in operations, ecological management and wellbeing for suppliers and workers in sustainable wildflower harvesting in the Western Cape of South Africa, to cross-institutional learning outcomes for wider stakeholders in the South African biodiversity-conservation community and corporate responsibility management of UK corporations. Indeed, the central objectives of the project and its four inter-connected work packages are all tied to achieving a set of ambitious, yet achievable, targets with respect to harvesting improvements, more effective routes to sustainability, and knowledge exchange with stakeholders on the subject of corporate responsibility and sustainability.

Through Work Package 1, the key beneficiaries will be: the suppliers, picking teams and Flower Valley Conservation Trust's (FVCT's) conservation management team in terms of improved monitoring systems and techniques for sustainable harvesting, and the FVCT and its commercial partner, Fynsa, in terms of increasing the credibility of their Sustainable Harvesting Code of Practice. There will also be ecological benefits from this work package through the longitudinal assessments of harvesting impacts.

Through Work Package 2, the key beneficiaries will be: the Xhosa-speaking migrant workers from the Eastern Cape who will have access to the new multi-lingual learning resources used in training; members of picking teams benefitting from further ecological training and upskilling; and potential entrepreneurs in the local rural economy benefitting from training and support in small business start-up.

Work Package 3, embodying an original research component on the emergence of ethical consumerism in South Africa as a 'rising power' economy in the global South, will directly benefit FVCT and its commercial partner, Fynsa, in terms of a more comprehensive understanding of how their sustainably-harvested wild flowers fit into a broader South African 'ethical marketplace' through both niche and mainstream retail channels. This constitutes both a commercial and an ethical benefit for the organisations. However, the potential for knowledge exchange opportunities reaches further into benefits for wider stakeholders, such as Fruit South Africa (FruitSA) who work with transnational corporations as well as South African NGOs, consultancies and government to harmonise the implementation of ethical codes within South Africa's agricultural industries. Our pilot research will be valuable in enabling their programme to be aligned to the ethical concerns of domestic consumers. Similar learning outcomes are possible for UK-based retail members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), who have store networks in South Africa. Benefits from this work package are also expected to extend to the academic community in terms of shaping the agenda for knowledge exchange in applied geographical research on the 'rising powers'.

Work Package 4 represents the section of the project explicitly focused on communications and cross-institutional learning through the two Cape Town workshops and the UK-based presentation to the ETI in London. Key beneficiaries are numerous and fall into the following two categories: members of the Western Cape biodiversity-conservation community (e.g. the South African National Biodiversity Institute, Green Choice, CapeNature, Table Mountain Fund and Provincial Government) through the workshops on the operationalisation of biodiversity-business initiatives and discussion of Work Packages 1-3; and the ethical trade practitioner community in the UK including the corporate, NGO and union membership of the ETI to whom we will present the learning outcomes of this project and for whom learning on corporate engagement with innovative overseas partners will be valuable. The presentation to the ETI will be enhanced by the attendance and participation of a member of the FVCT.