Getting Real, and Tree DNA

A group of curious kids from Arimae during the 2007 planting

People’s desire for more real—more authentic—goods and experiences offers companies an opportunity to make their operations more sustainable, while creating products that are increasingly in demand.

Fast Company posted an article on people wanting more “real” connections to the products they own, foods they eat, and experiences they have. Maybe it’s because the time we spend online makes us feel physically disconnected from other humans, or the growing number of health scares resulting from mass-produced food products, but the desire for “real” is fueling what we see as some positive trends in consumption.

The local food movement and consumers’ desire to understand the companies that create the products they consume are two examples. Companies increasingly need to connect with their customers in more meaningful ways. We want to understand and support culture and values of the company’s whose goods we consume:

“Companies can fulfill this desire for a real experience by offering new ways for people to see, touch, and feel where the products they buy come from. ‘Consumer safaris’ enable people to travel to where a product is made to meet the craftspeople who make it.”

At the same time, technological advances are facilitating this trend. The Fast Company article mentions a company called Icebreaker Merino that manufactures sustainable, high end merino wool apparel. You get a “baacode” for each item you buy, which lets you trace it

“back to the source in New Zealand where you can see how the sheep live, read about their growers, and follow its production through to the finished garment.”

The Economist recently ran an article on using DNA technology to trace the origination of tropical hardwoods. DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies, the Indonesian company featured in the piece, uses DNA testing to pinpoint where the wood came from, enabling tropical timber importers, furniture manufacturers and resellers to ensure that the wood was sustainably harvested. While expensive, the increasing focus on conservation enforcement and associated legal trouble (e.g. Gibson Guitar) may accelerate the number of companies who require origination testing for their wood.

So, what does this mean for us?

As a small, socially responsible tropical timber company, the shareholders who support us tend to take a more invested interest in how we work, and we expect that the customers who will purchase our timber products will as well. While we're still a few years away from producing timber from our projects, we envision a line of products that engages peoples’ sense of connectedness to our operations.

Imagine tracing the mahogany side table in your bedroom back to our sustainable forestry projects in Darien, Panama. You might see that the wood for your side table came from a tree sprouted in the nursery of our community forestry partner Arimae. Then it grew for 20 years down the road from the community, soaking up the tropical sun and seasonal rains, and providing shade and habitat for rich local biodiversity.

After harvesting the tree, it goes to the sawmill in the community where it is cut into boards. Then you might picture the wood in the hands of a skilled indigenous craftsman, planing the boards smooth, inspecting the joints for a tight fit, and finishing the final piece to a golden shine. He signs the end table and drops a note into the drawer thanking you for supporting the local furniture industry, and inviting you down to Panama to see Planting Empowerment’s operations firsthand.

Then it goes to our warehouse in Panama City, into a shipping container, onto the ship, across the Caribbean, to the port, onto the truck, into our showroom, into your car, and into your bedroom.

We hope that would provide the kind of real experience that grows our business while reducing illegal logging and creating opportunities for our community forestry partners.

Call for Renewed Focus on Sustainable Forestry

A Nuevo Paraiso girl enjoys some local sugar cane

We enjoyed reading CIFOR director Peter Holmgren’s call for a new focus on sustainable forestry. One of the first things he states is that “Fair, affordable and accessible private finance that promotes sustainable land use, particularly for rural smallholders, is needed.”

Amen.

Driving capital towards sustainable agroforestry projects is something that Planting Empowerment has been working on since we started developing our Equitable Forestry model back in 2006. Using private sector finance for community and smallholder forestry is all too much of a niche. We need more capital at work for programs that facilitate sustainable land use by forest-dependent communities. Where we work in Panama for example, our community forestry partners can receive subsidized financing for cattle ranching, but no financing for agroforestry projects because they are a longer term proposition.

Holmgren also mentions the need to understand the food security dynamic tied to forestry. While many countries are deforesting in the name of food security, there needs to be a better understanding of how forests provide food and increased focus on how agroforestry systems can strengthen food security. Towards that goal, Planting Empowerment is currently scaling the production of plantains in our agroforestry system. Plantains are a food staple in Panama and their price increased substantially over the last two years. We also think there is the opportunity to plant guandules, or pidgeon peas, which is a local favorite and fixes nitrogen into the soil during its growth.

We're glad to see Holmgren drawing attention to these issues, and hope that he continues to highlight them during his tenure. Increased research and resources need to be directed to promoting food security and sustainable forestry, for the sake of both those living in forests and the world at large.

Canopy Tower Family Invests in Planting Empowerment

Planting Empowerment (/), a socially responsible forestry company working in Panama, announced today that the Canopy Tower Family, a renowned group of eco-lodges, has invested in Planting Empowerment.

Washington, DC (PRWEB) September 27, 2012—Canopy Tower Family, a Panama-based ecotourism company, announced today that they have made a significant investment in Planting Empowerment, a socially responsible forestry company. The investment will enable Planting Empowerment to expand its operations in Panama’s Darien province, where it has been growing tropical hardwoods for the past six years.

“We invested in Planting Empowerment because we support their mission of profitable, socially-responsible forestry”, said Raul Arias de Para, Canopy Tower Family's founder. “They fit our own business well because we both have an interest in managing natural resources more sustainably and conserving virgin forests. They’re reforesting native tree species in some of the most environmentally sensitive areas in Panama, but also keeping the land in the hands of the local indigenous communities and small farmers. It’s more sustainable in the long run.”

Damion Croston, Operations Director for Planting Empowerment, commented “We lease those plots of land from local communities and reforest with mixed tropical hardwoods and crops. Planting Empowerment’s model provides income, replenishes the soil, grows food, and cultivates high value tropical timber.”

As elsewhere in Latin America, Panama’s natural resources are under constant pressure from logging and subsistence agriculture, which rural farmers depend on to feed their families. Cattle ranching also accelerates deforestation, leading to loss of biodiversity, soil erosion and spread of non-native grasses. Unsustainable management of natural resources threatens biodiversity in Panama, and the long term growth prospects for local communities. Farmers either have to commit more resources to getting the same amount of production from their land, or they move on to a new plot of rainforest.

With the Canopy Tower Family investment, Planting Empowerment will expand its operations and profile in Panama as a forestry company with a strong socially-responsible component. “They’re not the largest forestry company in Panama by far” noted Raul Arias de Para, “but they have been growing steadily over the past six years, and I think they’ll continue to grow as more investors recognize that their profit and sustainability goals go hand-in-hand.”            

About Planting Empowerment
Founded in 2006, Planting Empowerment is a private, Washington, DC-based company with forestry operations in Panama. Planting Empowerment works in partnership with rural communities in Panama to grow tropical hardwoods and promote sustainable land use. As the first forestry company in Panama to work through a land lease model, Planting Empowerment has 60 acres of trees under management on land owned by local farmers and communities.

Contact:
Andrew Parrucci
Marketing Director
Planting Empowerment
Phone: 804.433.8733
amparrucci@plantingempowerment.com

A Report Card for Impact

The Gonzales family in Nuevo ParaisoFor social enterprises and organizations engaged in impact investing, quantifying impact has become increasingly important to them and their investors and donors. In the same way that traditional investors scrutinize a company’s financials before deciding to invest, responsible investors increasingly want to see that their investments are producing the social good that they set out to create.

Quantifying impact basically means attempting to measure the change that the organization intends to create. For example, an organization dedicated to the preservation and expansion of affordable housing might measure the number of affordable housing units developed over the past year, or the number of low income people housed.

Planting Empowerment cultivates tropical hardwoods and crops for financial return, but also to produce real social and environmental returns for our partners in Panama. From a reporting perspective, it’s easy to measure the number of trees we plant, or the amount of land we have under cultivation, or the number of plantains we’ve produced. We can even measure the increase in incomes of our partners because of their working with us.

But it’s harder to measure how that work translates into longer term sustainable management of natural resources by our partners, or the amount of rainforest we’ve conserved because of our work. Both of those imply that we’ll have changed the mentality of our partners. So how do we measure that?

Measuring impact has become a hot topic over the past several years. Both responsible investors/performance-focused donors and impact investing associations and organizations offering these types of investments are trying to agree on how to truly measure “impact”. There are industry-specific certifications such as the Forest Stewardship Council’s Forest management certification, but there is no standard definition of impact that cuts across all industries. Even when an organization understands what its long term term impact goals are, it’s difficult and costly to measure progress against those goals.

Against that backdrop, the Global Impact Investment Network launched its Global Impact Investment Rating System (GIIRS) to standardize social and environmental performance metrics for organizations engaged in impact investing. It is intended to enable investors to compare impact investments across industries by capturing not only financial performance data, but also the social and environmental benefits that an organization proactively creates. GIIRS uses a standard reporting language called IRIS (Impact Reporting and Investment Standards) to capture relevant performance data from companies and funds.

We recently decided to adopt the IRIS language for our own reporting purposes. While we’re still unsure as to whether companies and funds will have a competitive advantage by holding a GIIRS rating (which is a paid certification based on the IRIS taxonomy), using IRIS standards does make sense for Planting Empowerment for a few reasons:

1. It's a way to hold ourselves accountable to the goals we laid out in our recent strategic plan: the amount of capital we need to raise and the number of hectares of trees we’re aiming to plant, among others.
2. Once we've captured all the relevant metrics, we'll be able to more more tangibly communicate our work to prospective shareholders and our peers in the industry.
3. This further differentiates us from traditional forestry companies because it will reinforce Planting Empowerment’s long term goals of social and economic empowerment of our partners.
4. GIIRS certification may make sense for larger/institutional investors once we reach larger scale. The GIIRS assesment is based on the IRIS reporting language, so we would be ahead of the game.

As Planting Empowerment continues work with more partners and plant more trees, we need to be able to track and communicate our business’s financial, social and environmental impacts. Adopting the IRIS reporting standards gives us a smart way to do that.

WWF Switzerland Tropical Forest Challenge

We normally avoid blatant self promotion, but ...

Planting Empowerment was recently shortlisted for the WWF Switzerland Tropical Forest Challenge, which seeks to

"Discover the most innovative for-profit enterprises from around the world that have a positive impact on tropical forest biodiversity."

Well sir, I'd say that's what we're doing.

If you have a chance, please take a moment to vote for us. Register on their website, then navigate to our listing and click vote. You should see something like this.

Thanks!