Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 182

Established in the late nineteenth century as a French grain ship-
ment inspection house, SGS 29 is at the moment the world's leading
company in inspection, verification, testing and certification of prod-
ucts and processes in all sectors, with more than forty-two thousand
employees in a network of around one thousand offices and labora-
tories around the world. Skal International (in the process of merging
with Control Union 30 under the latter's name) is a much smaller and
more targeted global network in the ecolabelling of the food, feed and
wood sector. Established in 2002 in the Netherlands, in 2005 it had
more than one hundred employees, with a similar number of inspec-
tors and certifiers in many national offices in numerous countries. It has
become the expert organisation in translating (governmental and non-
governmental) environmental requirements in the food and wood sec-
tors into labelling schemes, but also in organising stakeholder support
and influence, in assessing what can be and what cannot be certified
and inspected, in product inspections (along the whole line of the value
chains and the transport routes). They run various programmes such
as EUREP/GAP, Greengold label (on palm oil use in biomass energy
production), Tesco Nature's Choice, Utz Kapeh coffee 31 and organic

production.
Each label and product-information system - whether it is in the food
or any other sector - has its own arrangement of actors collecting the
information, organisations verifying information, routes for transmis-
sion of the label or product information, arrangements and strategies
to deal with uncertainty and trust, and users that are addressed with
information. This diversity and omnipresence of labels and product
information, as well as the diversity of arrangements that come along
with them, have triggered fierce debates and controversies on verifi-
cation, public and private responsibilities, scientific basis, effectiveness
and trade barriers, without, however, jeopardising the further develop-
ment, growth and importance of labelling practices and related infor-
mation flows until now. The strong controversies also give evidence of

29

See http://www.sgs.com/.

30

See http://www.controlunion.com/main/default.htm.

31

Although inspection and verification usually goes down the value chain,
making sure that information of upstream activities (e.g., on production
circumstances) comes down to the end producer or retailer. In the Utz Kapeh
coffee scheme, the innovative inspection goes upwards, making sure that the
one-cent additional price paid by the consumer is returned to the individual
small-scale coffee producer.