Cargill encourages women to pursue leadership roles through palm oil empowerment program

27 Aug 2019 --- Cargill’s program to empower women at its palm plantation in South Sumatra, Indonesia, has won Top Honors in the “Sustainability/Ingredients” category of the 2019 BEST in Baking Program. The awards ceremony is sponsored by the International Baking Industry Exposition (IBIE), in partnership with Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery, to recognize exhibitors and suppliers driving progress in the baking industry. Cargill’s women’s empowerment program provides free services in childcare, a support network for women and mandatory maternity leave.

When asked about the duration of the program, Tai Ullmann, Global Sustainability Manager at Cargill, tells FoodIngredientsFirst, “It is an ongoing program with no end date. Cargill currently owns and operates five palm plantations, all in Indonesia. The initiatives we called out in the award application (summarized below) apply to all the plantations. We focused the application on the South Sumatra program because its employee committee was the most recently incorporated in 2018.”

To date, Cargill reports there are 6,066 women and 13,382 men working for its palm division in Southeast Asia. Although there is more work to be done, the company asserts that important steps are being taken to create an equitable environment for women to not only feel safe and supported at work but also empowered to develop and pursue leadership roles.

Palm oil is a key ingredient in bakery applications, while its production is traditionally a male-dominated industry, notes Cargill.Palm oil is a key ingredient in bakery applications, while its production is traditionally a male-dominated industry, as noted by Cargill. As such, women have faced challenges hindering inclusion and equality within this field. Through its program, Cargill is aiming to foster a transparent, traceable and sustainable palm oil supply chain and has put in place two key initiatives to help foster a healthy and safe work environment:

• Comprehensive services, such as strict maternity protection policies including a minimum of three months of maternity leave, breastfeeding support and prevention of discrimination. Cargill’s policies are supported through health care services that are delivered through 28 clinics. In addition, services include on-site daycare and free primary school education. Today, the company notes there are over 800 children attending 36 daycares and 6,000 children attending 43 schools under the program.
• Creation and support of employee networks and committees to help ensure the rights of our female colleagues are upheld. To provide employees with a physically and psychologically safe workplace, one such committee tracks and addresses harassment reports and serves as a forum for education through seminars and services on dealing with any compromise to women’s rights, and challenges unique to working mothers.

Research shows that the most effective way to address the worst forms of child labor and ensure more children attend school is by empowering women, Cargill highlights. Furthermore, studies have found that when women are given the same access to resources as men, farm yields increase 20 to 30 percent.

Challenges faced by women in industry
Cargill underlines the following challenges as significant barriers to female workers across the industry: 

• Around the world, women have less access to economic assets such as land and loans
• They produce 50 percent of the world’s food, but own just 1 percent of its land.
• 75 percent cannot get bank loans.
• 55 percent of the world’s girls are out of school.
• On average, women spend 19 percent of their time on unpaid activities, compared to 8 percent for men.
• Women face barriers to accessing training, which often takes place away from villages and at times when women are busy taking children to school or cooking family meals.
• Women’s participation in coops is often hampered by membership criteria such as land ownership, because the sector is seen as a “male domain,” or because they are not aware of the benefits of participation.

Training provided in the agricultural sector is mostly attended by men, although a large part of the work on the farm is done by women, the company underscores. Evaluations carried out by UTZ Certified, reveal that information provided to men during training is often not effectively passed on to women.

Cargill ran a project mapping out a typical day in the life of a woman living in a cocoa-growing community in West Africa. Through partnership with global humanitarian organization CARE, the company asked women directly how we can make training more accessible. Results of the survey reveal that two of the key obstacles that must be overcome are distance and timing, which the company hopes to address through its program development schemes.

Providing access to financial services
When women have access to affordable financial credit, they can begin to take steps towards economic stability and independence by becoming income generators in their own right, Cargill asserts. Working with CARE, Cargill has introduced community-based savings and loan schemes, known as Village Saving and Loan Associations (VSLAs), in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire which enable both men and women to access affordable finance. This approach is managed and governed by local communities and interest rates are very competitive, the company notes. Through introducing 165 VSLAs, upwards of 4,000 people – more than half of whom are women – have accessed credit which they can use to start and grow businesses, as well as taking care of personal needs such as paying school fees.

By Benjamin Ferrer