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Coca-Cola’s partnership with WWF promotes sustainable agriculture in Coca-Cola’s supply chain, focusing on the production of sugar cane, and more recently oranges and corn. They have initiated a number of pilot projects to improve production and farm practices.

The pilot projects comprise a developing, integrated, global program within the partnership to improve sugarcane production throughout the Coca-Cola system’s supply chain and WWF’s priority ecoregions. The pilots include Australia, Brazil, Honduras and South Africa with the fostering of farmer innovation to create more sustainable solutions for the community of sugarcane farmers, the development of a lab where researchers will develop solutions for controlling agricultural pests in cane fields through biological control rather than pesticides, and the funding and technical expertise to farmers who have developed new practices focused on sustainability and need resources to catalyze implementation.

Coca-Cola’s pilot projects with WWF are improving livelihoods for farming families, increasing crop yields while reducing costs and reducing environmental impacts as well as helping them better understand the opportunities they have to work with their suppliers to further develop their policies and procedures for more sustainable ingredient sourcing. Coca-Cola, in partnership with WWF, has collaborated with key suppliers to initiate activities that assist sugar mills to understand and work towards the certification achieving sustainable production from sugarcane in respect of economic, social and environmental dimensions. As a critical piece of this initiative, Coca-Cola affirmed the goal of advancing sustainable agriculture practices through promoting environmental stewardship and ensuring workplace rights.