Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals which are formulated by United Nations Development Program. Their formal name is “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” These comprise of issues of economic and social developments including hunger, poverty, health, education, gender equality, global warming, sanitation, urbanization, social justice and environment (United Nations Development Program, 2018).
These goals and targets are contained in Paragraph 54 of United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1 dated 25th September 2015. It involves its 170 member states and international civil society. It is an intergovernmental agreement which acts as the Post 2015 Developmental Agenda (Kickbusch, Orbinski, Winkler and Schnabel, 2015).
There are 169 targets for 17 goals. Each of the targets has indicators numbering from 1-3 which are used to measure the progress for accomplishing these goals. There are 304 indicators in all which would evaluate the compliances. One of the goals is to put an end of poverty in all its practices and from everywhere. In this context, gender equality plays a crucial role in eliminating poverty and its risks (Ardito, Carrillo?Hermosilla, del Río and Pontrandolfo, 2018).
So in this report, the Sustainability Goals would be evaluated in the context of The Hershey Company, an American company. It is one of the largest manufacturers of chocolate in the world. An application would also be prepared for managing the affairs of the company in a socially responsible, sustainable and ethical manner with the point of view of an SDG consultant.
The vision of the company was to transact in chocolates which was considered to be luxury product in the 19th century. It aimed at providing food which was healthy for the community ad struggled to support the business for years. So, in this regard the current sustainability foci of the company are to share goodness across all the components of value chain of the company. It aims at upholding the promise to crate products which are beneficial for the consumers and the business models targeted to make a difference in the world (McArthur and Rasmussen, 2018).
It aims at becoming an agent for the improvement of the planet and building communities which are progressive for the world. It has been working for serving nutritious food for the school going children of Ghana so that they can make the most of their education. It has also assisted 54000 farmers by initiating the ‘Learn to Grow ‘program. It has been endeavoring to reduce its greenhouse emissions by 2.7% against its pledge to reduce it by 25% by the year 2025 based on the levels of 2015. It has also minimized its wastages aroused due to packaging by 18.5 Million pounds against its target of 25 Million pounds by the year 2025 (Lu, Nakicenovic, Visbeck and Stevance, 2015).
For the advancement of the community, it has donated $11.9 Million in cash and $8.6 Million in the form of products. Also, it has volunteered 130,737 employee hours and donated a cash amount of $1.8 Million with the help of its employee Season of Giving Challenge. It has raised $550,000 with the help of its employee –led Children’s Miracle Network Team. It has helped in the advancement of women through a representation of 50% of women on its executive committee. In all 77% of its total workforce represent women (Baumgartner, 2014).
It has also opened up the Milton Hershey’s School which supports more than 2000 children who are in need. The company helps the children to succeed and assists them to access the nutritious food in a better way. It is also focused on addressing the climate change in the cocoa communities. It works with various stakeholders and partners to promote the culturally relevant sustainable programs which aim to provide supplemental nutrition to the children residing in West Africa with the help of fortified snack ViVi which is locally produced.
One of the important factors which drive the company to maintain sustainable development more efficiently is the SDG Compass which conveys the message of basic responsibilities of all the businesses irrespective of their size or industry in which they operate. It is mandatory for them to comply with the relevant legislation and uphold the standards which are recognized internationally. They have to respect the universal human rights. The Human Rights principle of the UN Global Compact as reaffirmed and explained by UN Guiding Principles of Business and Human Rights explains that respect of the human rights is different from the efforts of the company in assisting and promoting them (Holden, Linnerud, Banister, Schwanitz and Wierling, 2017).
It is the baseline expectation from all the companies that they should avoid infringement of human rights. They should also address any harm which has been aroused as a result of their own acts or business relationships. They should not offset their responsibilities with the efforts for promoting human rights or advancement for sustainable development (Sachs, 2015).
Other guiding principles which are applicable to all the companies are ILO Tripartite Declaration of Principles Concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy, UN Global Compact Principles and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human rights .These principles instruct all the companies to respect the universally applicable rights and maintain minimum standards of human rights. The UN Global Compact’s Ten Principles comprise of environment, human rights, labor and anti-corruption explain the minimum expectations of the organizations involved in sustainable development (Le Blanc, 2015).
In the context of Human Rights, the Principles suggest that business should assist and respect the safeguarding of universally claimed human rights and should ensure that they do not involve in abusing human rights. In the domain of labor standards, the business should maintain the rights to collective bargaining and freedom of association. The businesses should eliminate all forms of compulsory and forced labor. They should attempt to abolish all forms of child labor (The Hershey Company, 2017).
The Principles suggest that the company should eliminate discriminative policies in occupation and employment. As per the guidelines on anti-corruption, they should work against corruption of all types specially bribery and extortion. The environmental guidelines suggest that the business should support the precautionary approaches against the challenge posed by the environment. Additionally, the companies are advised to follow the guidelines of SDGs including OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and ISO 26000 Guidance on Social responsibility (Giupponi and Gain, 2017).
SDGs are currently being used by the company in planning and reporting as The Hershey’s Company has followed the guidelines on food security by ensuring that children have an easy access to the food required by them after school and in summer vacations. In this context, it has partnered with Feeding America for meeting its goals of eliminating the problem of hunger amongst school going children.
For addressing the SDG of climate change, it has helped the cocoa farmers to evaluate new opportunities to address the agricultural risks. In the year 2016, the company has been associated the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) Climate Smart Cocoa Program to empower public and private sectors so that they can address the threats posed by climate changes to the cocoa communities (Kolk, 2016).
With the help of WCF, it has launched a series of programs in the cocoa sector to advance the best practices for adapting changes in the climate like utilizing draught resistant planting material. It has initiated the Learn to grow training programs comprising of CocoaLink, a program developed by Heshey which utilizes mobile technology which is of low cost for delivering information on agriculture to the cocoa farmers residing in the rural areas of West Africa (Rasmussen, Bierbaum, Oldekop and Agrawal, 2017).
It also promotes a healthy work culture through its commitment for inclusion and flexibility. It is consistently working for creating a compelling workplace for and with its employees. It has developed Smart Flex which are policies and practices for creating mindset for maintaining the work life balance for motivating and empowering its employees so that they can make clever choices for themselves and for the business of the company. For this, it listens to the opinions of its employees while developing the policies for the workplace.
Its sustainability goals include accomplishing food safety certifications recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) at its wholly owned manufacturing and joint venture operations by the year 2022 .It has to enroll 70,000 farmers by the year 2019 in its Learn to grow Program and source 100% certified and sustainable coconut by 2020. Its goal is to procure 100% sugar purchases from accountable and sustainable sources (Khalili, Duecker, Ashton and Chavez, 2015).
Regarding the attainment of goals of safeguarding the environment, it has to reduce GHG emission of 25% by the end of year 2025. It has to reduce the total water consumption to 25% by the end of year 2025. It aims to reduce wastages by 25% at the end of 2025. It has continued to accomplish the top tier safety performance as evaluated by its innovative training programs focusing on introducing measurable improvements in the metrics of people and safety (Hosseinpoor, Bergen, Schlotheuber and Grove, 2018).
The three SDGs which are more relevant to the company are Climate Action, Zero Hunger and Quality Education. The first SDG is taking urgent actions to mitigate the risk of changes in the climate and its effects by controlling emissions and promotion of progresses in renewable sources of energy. In this regard, being a responsible corporate citizen, the company has helped in mitigating the risk of climate change by signing the Cocoa & Forests Initiative and it has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to stem out deforestation .It is attempting to revise the environmental strategy so that it can make the best use of available sciences and evidence for developing the targets with significant impact. It has also reduced 2.7% of greenhouse gases against its target of reducing 25% by the year 2025. It has also planted 133,333 trees in Kentucky, Florida and Virginia along with Arbor Day Foundation (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018).
Its second goal should be eliminate hunger as it operates in food industry. It should achieve food security and improve the nutritional intakes of people who are deprived of it and promote sustainable agriculture. For this, the company has joined the nonprofit organization Rise Against Hunger for the purpose of supporting the shared social purpose and Nourishing minds. Around 1,000 employees participated in the meal packaging program all over the world. Till 2017, it had reached milestone of packing 1,178,560 meals with the nonprofit organization since 2014. These meals have been disseminated amongst 11,000 people in about seven countries (Dizdaroglu, 2015).
Being a member of several sustainable development programs, it is the responsibility of the company to participate in the end hunger program. So, several employees have partnered with community food banks and led activities with organizations helping to end hunger of the children. The purpose is to bring an end to hunger and achieve food security and enhanced nutrition. It aims at promoting sustained agriculture.
The third goal is to ensure quality and inclusive education for promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all the people. Being a member of the United Nations Development Program, it is the responsibility of the company to participate in promoting quality education, especially at the primary school level. For this, The Milton Hershey School has been helping children belonging to disadvantaged background so that their potential is fully realized by offering them cost free, residential and quality education to the students studying in preschool up to 12th Standard. Almost 2000 students have attended this school (Nicolescu, 2018).
It has also conducted educational programs in the area of energy conservation so that opportunities for efficiency of energy can be identified and the amount of energy used can be minimized. In the year 2016, it has replaced the three chillers placed at the top of the three plants in US for minimizing the consumption of energy (Arora, 2017).
Innovative and viable strategies for the company for contributing toward the three SDGs along with evaluating appropriate targets for accomplishment of these strategies
As per World Economic Forum (2018) for addressing the need to safeguard the climate from further deterioration, several renewable sources of energy can be used such as nuclear and solar energy. As nuclear power produces power which is free from carbon emissions. It is to be harnessed in a safe and cost effective manner.
Also, the commercial vehicles should be powered by electricity instead of traditional fuels. In order to execute it on a wider scale, more efficient batteries are required with advanced battery charging technology. The company can use technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its power, lightening and cooling. The company can adopt the technology of capturing CO2 directly from the air. It can process and use it further as a low emission fuel (Busch, Bauer and Orlitzky, 2016).
As per Renton (2013) the company should promote the development of sustainable agriculture which plays an important role in generating earnings required for ensuring food security. Agriculture is the leading sector in the rural areas and most of the farming is done through small holders. With regards to higher prices of food, they have better opportunities for the farmers to evaluate commercially viable operations. In this context, the company should promote primary education and awareness about health care which can increase the income of the rural households.
The overall investment climate is dependent upon factors such as peace and stability, managing macroeconomic management, good governance and developed institutions and appropriate physical infrastructure. The company should invest in implementation of the action targeted to redress the urban bias in allocation of resources. These investments can assist the farmers directly and enhance the supply of food and help in creating an upward pressure on the prices of food and dampening the volatility of prices associated with tight markets (Mascarenhas, Nunes and Ramos, 2015).
The company should adopt the techniques of innovative education in the school. It is essential for addressing the needs for present and future education to assist the students so that they can realize their full potential. The higher education can be paired up with innovative entrepreneurial strategies so that they can teach basics of management to the children from the beginning of their careers (Charles Jr, Schmidheiny and Watts, 2017).
The main aim of the charitable project was to accomplish the sustainable developmental goals by the company. There were several constraints while attempting this task. It confronted the constraints pertaining to time schedules, scope and cost. The scope is related with the specified goals, tasks and deliverables which define the boundaries of this project.
The time schedule defines the time line within which the project should be completed and it comprises of final deadline of its completion. The problem of mismanaging or delay of the tasks has led to overrunning of the deadline. The overrunning of the task shall lead to additional costs. It will also impact the quality, scope and satisfaction of the consumers as the staff may be unable to remain available for remaining time.
Cost was another major factor contributing to the limitations of the project. It involved financial limitation of input of resources and the overall limit of the net amount which can be spent. The constraints were mutually exclusive. It means that alteration of one of the constraints shall affect the other constraints as well.
Lastly, the project also confronted the issue of technical constraints. It focused on architectural decisions which restricted the design of the solution. They tend to be rigid and inflexible. It comprised of areas such as developmental languages, software and hardware and other infrastructure. It is also associated with risks as the assumptions may turn out to be unrealistic at the end of the project.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that a number of challenges are being confronted by The Hershey Company for the execution of sustainable development goals (SDGs). The challenges include complying with the international legislations and upholding the internationally recognized standards along with respecting the universal human rights. The three SDGs which are considered to be most relevant for the company are climate action, zero hunger and quality education. The first SDG is concerned with taking urgent actions to mitigate the risk posed by the changes in the climate and its effects by controlling emissions and promotion of expansions in renewable sources of energy. The second goal aims at achieving food security along with improving the nutritional intakes of people who are deprived of it. The third goal is to ensure quality and inclusive education for promoting enduring learning opportunities for all the people.
This report also focused on the innovative and viable strategies for the company which contributes toward these three SDGs along with the evaluation of appropriate targets for the accomplishment of these strategies. It provides that the company should power the commercial vehicles through electricity instead of traditional fuels. It can also adopt the technology for capturing CO2 directly from the air. It can process and use it further as a low emission fuel. The development of sustainable agriculture should also be promoted by the company.
References
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