FEFAC recently released the “Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021,” an upgraded version of the original guidelines, released in 2015. In line with the FEFAC “Feed Sustainability Charter 2030” ambitions for continuous improvement on responsible soy sourcing, the upgraded guidelines cover a range of additional essential and new desired criteria. The upgraded guidelines provide a credible verifiable source of information to soy value chain partners and other stakeholders on available market solutions for responsibly produced soy destined to European feed market.

The FEFAC “Soy Sourcing Guidelines” lay down a set of criteria and verification requirements enabling interested responsible soy schemes and programs to enter an independent benchmark process facilitated and performed by ITC (International Trade Center). The guidelines are not designed as a standard or a professional soy sourcing recommendation. Nineteen responsible programs successfully passed the benchmarking exercise against the former guidelines. Based on data collection from members, FEFAC estimates that almost half of the total European feed industry soy usage is responsibly produced.

A new innovative feature of the latest guidelines is the possibility for responsible soy schemes to voluntarily benchmark themselves, against a new desired criterion, on their capacity to deliver “conversion-free soy”  providing credible and verifiable assurances that the respective soy cultivation did not drive conversion of natural eco-systems. The schemes that deliver this “conversion-free soy” will be displayed on the FEFAC webpage on ITC Sustainability Map via a transparency tool, making transparent the respective applicable cut-off date and chain of custody options. FEFAC currently expects that the new round of benchmarking of interested responsible soy programmes can start in Spring 201 with initial results available to soy chain partners as from May 2021.

 “I am confident that today FEFAC has been able to make a significant contribution to further increase market transparency for responsible soy sourcing. This now includes the possibility for interested programs to benchmark against the new conversion-free criterion, within the limits of its pre-competitive mandate,” said FEFAC President Asbjørn Børstin. “I expect that the new version of the FEFAC ‘Soy Sourcing Guidelines 2021’ will remain a key tool for operators and chain partners of the European soy value chain assisting their combined efforts for the mainstream market transition towards sustainable soy sourcing, despite the very challenging market environment”.