Knowledge Transfer Tools for Enhancing Sustainability

The majority of SMEs needs repeated explanations and evidences to be convinced about the feasibility of adopting measures for improving sustainability. This is a particularly challenging task since meeting the requirements of business growth, reduction of environmental impact, social responsibility and good governance at the same time requires complex thinking and ability to find trade-offs. Human and financial resources of SMEs are usually limited. It is difficult to motivate them to change their practices until they can’t see that these changes improve or at least maintain the viability of their business and will bring them clear benefits and relatively quick return of their invested efforts and resources. Although everybody agrees that the reduction of the environmental impact and increasing the social responsibility of food and agriculture businesses is unavoidable and beneficial for the society in general, SMEs are not convinced that their additional costs and efforts will be acknowledged by the customers and consumers. If during the explanation of the sustainability requirements the main emphasis is put on the environmental aspects this message may not be satisfactory effective to persuade food SMEs to take actions, particularly in the less affluent countries. Similar typical causes of the reluctance to act on improving compliance to environmental and social requirements were found in the Latin- American countries and in Hungary, which include the following arguments and concerns: • The smaller is a business, the smaller is its contribution to the total environmental impact. • Many other businesses including larger ones than us can continue to make business without making major changes in their activities. Why should we make the first step? Is it a real consumer requirement? • Who will cover the additional costs of the changes, sustainability measures? • Our limited resources have to be focused on production. We do not have time to spend on measurements and calculations. Why shall we share our data with our competitors, why shall we give them information, what they can use for competing with us? Although customer requirements can be used to impose pressure on suppliers to achieve some changes their impact will be limited until the suppliers can find alternative markets for their products produced with the current practices. Better improvement can be achieved by convincing SMEs that the changes towards improved environmental and social performance will result in improved competitiveness and profitability. For persuading SMEs their main problems in operating their business should be understood – e.g. the permanent struggle to cope with the pressure of the customers to reduce prices and in parallel to comply with the more and more demanding legal and customer food safety, environmental and social requirements while price of energy, water, material and cost of labour is permanently increasing. Such value propositions should be offered for them which provide a solution for harmonised improvement of several aspects of some of these expectations. Both in LA and in South-East Europe farmers and SMEs have to be convinced about the benefits and trained on the appropriate methods of collaborating with peers, to share resources and costs without disclosing confidential information Experiences collected during work with food SMEs showed that resource efficiency and improving competitiveness are very attractive subjects for nearly all of them. Improving the efficiency of using resources such as energy, water, material, and packaging material not only results in reduction of costs but also leads to reduction of environmental impact. More efficient use of labour force will also reduce costs and potential solutions for using the staff saved to increase the added value of the products and services can be explored instead of making them redundant. Thus the subject of resource efficiency provides an approach through which the interest of food SMEs can be raised and direct benefits reflected by better competitiveness can be offered in parallel with the reduction of environmental impact. In addition to that several benefits of collaboration along the food chain can also be explained to SMEs.