Human Rights Impact Assessment
Pilgrims UK in partnership with Co-op and Waitrose publish results of their Human Rights Impact Assessment
Pilgrim’s UK, one of the UK’s largest food companies and Britain’s biggest provider of higher welfare pork, together with its retail partners Waitrose and Co-op, have conducted a first-of-its-kind human rights impact assessment (HRIA) on its integrated pork and lamb supply networks. The assessment is aimed at helping the businesses achieve their shared ambition of a fully transparent supply chain.
The assessment is the first-of-its-kind for a livestock supply chain globally due to its scale and wide-ranging criteria. It spanned Pilgrim’s UK’s outdoor-bred pig farms and lamb farms, as well as the business’ processing and abattoir sites, from which Co-op and Waitrose source the majority of their pork and all of Waitrose’s lamb products.
Pilgrim’s UK, Co-op and Waitrose’s HRIA will help all three businesses gain a deeper understanding of how their practices are affecting farmers, workers and other stakeholders working in the pig and lamb supply chains within the UK, and the actions they can take to mitigate, prevent or remediate any identified impacts.
The assessment has been undertaken in collaboration with ethical trade consultancy firm, Impactt Ltd.
The assessment covered the period between October 2021 to February 2022, during which the UK pork industry faced the most severe challenges in its history, with labour shortages and end of the Covid-19 pandemic being among factors that led to a significant backlog of pigs.
Please see here the link to the Executive Summary and Action Plan
Please see here the link to the full report