Fyffes Completes Community Needs Assessments of its Farm Neighbourhoods in Latin America

Fyffes has partnered with independent experts its fruit production countries to better understand the needs of its neighbouring communities and collect essential information to support Fyffes ongoing human rights and environmental due diligence. One of Fyffes sustainability targets is to ensure that 100% of Fyffes priority communities are engaged in resilient socio-economic community projects out of Fyffes four community investment areas (nutrition and health, climate change resilience, gender empowerment and promoting access to education) by 2030.

Fyffes worked with several experts and organisations to anonymously survey over 2,200 participants from communities surrounding its farms in Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras, beginning in 2021.

Despite the wide range of different locations in Fyffes production footprint, some common themes emerged as priority areas for development:

• Community development
• Access to healthcare and medical facilities
• Access to healthy affordable fresh produce
• Stable employment and better incomes
• Women’s empowerment and gender equality
• Access to water
• Climate change vulnerability
• Activities to combat drug addition, alcoholism, and violence

Fyffes has already begun a number of projects which are helping to address these community needs, such as medical brigades in Honduras and Belize, fruit donations to schools and foodbanks, infrastructure improvements in schools to support children returning to school, post pandemic in Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras and the gender equality programme, which Fyffes has begun rolling out in all its Latin American operations.

Speaking about the survey, Fyffes sustainability manager Stella Davis said “The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights require companies to understand their role in causing or contributing to human rights impacts. The first step to achieving this is to firstly understand how the organization impacts human beings living and working near or on their operations. The insights provided by the communities on what really matters to them informs how we allocate our donation budget. In addition, Community Needs Assessments ensure we anticipate emerging legislation on environmental and human rights due diligence.”