The Importance of Building an Equitable Supply Chain

The world relies on the global supply chain. It supports growing economies while providing consumers access to innovative products and services that quickly become an everyday part of our expected standards of living. It also helps to generate vast wealth for large corporations and can support individual entrepreneurs around the world who act as suppliers of raw ingredients and materials for everything from food to textiles and electronics.

However, while politicians and corporate leaders debate trade policies, tariffs, and regulations, issues of human rights and equitable access along the supply chains are often absent from the conversation.

Alena Kahle is one of the people working hard to change that. Kahle is the senior policy and project coordinator at the Fair Trade Advocacy Office, a Brussels-based advocacy wing of the Fair Trade movement, which works to bring fairness, equity, dialogue, and cooperation to global trade policies.

As an advocate for equitable trade policies, Kahle is heavily invested in the sustainability policies of the European Union (EU), especially the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which is currently under consideration as part of the proposed Omnibus Regulation. “The Fair Trade Advocacy Office focuses on the impact that legislation will have on more marginalized individuals, but especially those who are smallholder farmers, who are actors with very small businesses that are trying to integrate fairness principles into their daily operations,” said Kahle. “Many of them are also sustainability front runners, and it’s always really cool to see what they’re doing and how they’re trying to push the needle by using their own businesses to live those sustainable business practices.”