USDOL-ILAB awarded a cooperative agreement to FLA to pilot the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Guidelines for Eliminating Child and Forced Labor in Agricultural Supply Chains in the hazelnut supply chain in Turkey.
The Guidelines recommend a set of practices for independent third-party monitoring and verification for the production, processing, and distribution of agricultural products or commodities with the goal of reducing the likelihood that such products or commodities imported into the United States are produced by child labor and/or forced labor.
The Guidelines are designed to be broadly applicable to companies seeking to improve conditions in agricultural supply chains for many different commodities or in different companies.
The Practitioners’ Guide created by FLA is intended to help companies applying or considering applying the USDA Guidelines to better understand the concepts on which they are based, and how to implement them in practice.
The USDA Guidelines include the following topics:
- Standards setting
- Supply chain mapping and risk assessment
- Monitoring
- Remediation
- Internal process review
- Communication
- Third-party monitoring
- Verification
The Practitioners ‘ Guide focuses on the first five content elements of the USDA Guidelines.
In addition, FLA developed a comprehensive and easy-to-use self-assessment tool for companies with agricultural supply chains. The tool is intended to provide companies with a measure of the extent to which they are applying the elements of the USDA Guidelines in one or more of their supply chains in support of their social compliance, sustainability, or human rights due diligence programs.
The self-assessment tool was created by BSD Consulting in cooperation with FLA. This user guide provides an overview of the tool, how it can be used by a company, and how the results of the self-assessment can be interpreted.
