Building resilience in the Argentinian peanut sector
10th April 2024
Underscoring its ambition to inspire and catalyse the widespread adoption of climate smart and regenerative agriculture, SAI Platform is enabling members to kickstart regenerative agriculture initiatives across diverse geographic and farming systems throughout 2024.
The launch of the Argentina Peanuts Climate Smart and Regenerative Agriculture project marks an important step forward for SAI Platform’s Regenerating Together programme.
In partnership with five funding members, including Intersnack, Lorenz, Mars, Pip & Nut, and Unilever, this 1-year fact-finding and baselining study across the Argentina peanut sector, aims to understand the potential to mitigate GHG emissions and build sector resilience in the face of increasing drought and climate impacts, through more sustainable and regenerative agriculture practice. The project is catalysed by members’ needs to meet ambitious climate targets and in turn, participation will help to secure long term market access for the sector.
The project will be implemented by GapGreen, selected as a trusted local partner with extensive knowledge and understanding of the Argentinian agriculture sector. The project aims to facilitate collaboration between members, suppliers, and other key local stakeholders to deliver the following key outputs by the end of 2024:
- An aggregated GHG emissions and regenerative agriculture baseline for participating farms
- A transition support roadmap for each farm, including how to approach building resilience and reducing GHG emissions
- A summary report extracting the key learnings across the sector
“Intersnack has set an ambitious SBTi target to reduce our emissions. Agriculture plays a key role in those reductions – however, there is still a lot of learning to be done. We are therefore excited to work with other SAI Platform members, peanut producers and local stakeholders on creating a joint understanding and look forward to sharing the insights with the broader food and beverage sector as they emerge.”
Marcos Lafuente, Procurement Consultant for Intersnack.
The outputs will be achieved by collecting baseline data from 25 farms across a total of ~7,500Ha of production land. Understanding that the impact of a farm’s operations extends beyond a single crop and as there are complex interactions across the full rotation which need to be considered, the project will take a whole farm approach.
For this phase, GapGreen will use the Cool Farm Tool (CFT), and SAI Platform’s Regenerating Together framework to build a baseline for GHG emissions and regenerative agriculture practices for each farm. The data will then be anonymously aggregated for sector-wide insight.
The Argentina Peanuts Climate Smart and Regenerative Agriculture project builds on the successful completion of the Farm Sustainability Assessment (FSA) Accelerator in 2022 which saw members and suppliers collaborate effectively to drive FSA implementation and verification.
Looking to the future, the findings of the baseline study conducted as part of this year long project in 2024 will inform a potential multi-year project to equitably transition the sector towards climate smart and regenerative agriculture.
