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Agriculture & Commodities

Featured Cases:

  • Shaping Consumer Demand for Healthier Eating

  • Guiding Chile’s Salmon Farmers toward More Sustainable Community Relations

  • Bolstering Palm Oil Value Chain Sustainability

The Challenge

Agriculture has experienced dramatic shifts over the past half century. As production and efficiency have increased, so have impacts on land, soil, and water, resulting in major disruption worldwide. In developed countries, consumers demand sustainable and humane production. While hundreds of millions across the globe remain malnourished, rates of obesity and related diseases are escalating in the developed world. The complex challenge of feeding a growing global population nutritious, safe, and affordable food while doing minimal harm to the environment often leads to disputes among parties with different perspectives.

Our Approach

Our mediators help build agreements on agriculture, commodity supply chains, and nutrition at the local, state, federal, and international levels. CBI has successfully:

  • Worked directly with farmers and ranchers, major agricultural companies, and advocates
  • Deployed assessments, strategic planning, and our deep knowledge of this complex field to help parties build new networks, connections, and programs
  • Leveraged assets across sectors to reform, refine, or even rebuild supply chains

Whether addressing dysfunction in the palm oil supply chain in Latin America or helping local farmers and public health agents in Massachusetts engage more productively, CBI brings the process tools and substantive expertise to support stakeholder negotiation and engagement. 

Areas of Expertise
  • Agriculture and water quality
  • Local, regional, and global supply chains
  • Nutrition, obesity, and public health
  • U.S. national farm and food policy
  • Global sustainable standard setting
View cases & related resources
  • CBI worked with us on the merger of two organizations into our current coalition, a complicated process that spanned 1.5 years and involved engagement with dozens of parties. Pat’s skilled facilitation, coupled with his deep knowledge of agriculture, helped us develop a plan that had unanimous support from all involved. We now have a thriving organization, with double the number of members that we had at the time of the merger.

    Ferd Hoefner

    Senior Strategic Advisor

    National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

Get In Touch

CBI Experts:

  • Patrick Field Senior Mediator
  • Merrick Hoben Director, Washington Office / Corporate-Community Engagement Practice
  • Linkedin

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