Agri-Food Supply Chains and the Business Case for Landscape-Level Approaches

This brief emphasizes the importance of landscape-level approaches (LLA) for agri-food businesses to achieve sustainable supply chains. LLA involve multi-stakeholder collaboration within a landscape to achieve sustainability goals that benefit nature, people, and businesses. It presents the strong business case for participating in LLA, highlighting benefits that include supply chain risk mitigation and supporting companies’ efforts to meet the growing sustainability expectations of their stakeholders. This document explores lessons learnt from secondary research, reports, and case-studies. It aims to distil ideas that build a business case for LLA, solutions to common challenges, and widely used strategies.

Key messages in this briefing paper include the need to build partnerships with diverse stakeholders like local communities, NGOs, specialized LLA organisations, and local governments which is key for the private sector. It also highlights that the business case for LLA includes benefits like strengthening businesses’ social license to operate, increased resilience of supply chains and the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of interventions, generating added value to products through sustainability, and contributing to corporate sustainability goals.