The Marrakech Process
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Marrakech Process Task Force on Cooperation with Africa Towards a Regional Ecolabelling Scheme

With environmental requirements increasingly used to define commercial relationships, meeting strict standards is becoming an imperative for producers in Africa.

Plans are underway to create an African ecolabelling scheme that would integrate environmental and health-related standards into the design and production of African products. Once in place, companies around the region would be able to apply for certification that their products had met the continent’s best environmental standards, helping them to penetrate large – and increasingly savvy – consumer markets, both in Africa and elsewhere.

Spearheading those efforts is the Task Force for Cooperation with Africa, a seven-member team of Governments, United Nations agencies and organizations working to develop a policy framework to cover pillar sectors such as forestry, agriculture, tourism and textiles. The plans stand to impact everything from the leather shoes we wear, to the scarves we drape to the juice we drink to get a start on our day.

“The main goal of the African Ecolabelling Scheme is to increase the access – and competitiveness – of environmentally friendly African products in regional and international markets,” says Ulf Jaeckel, a German Government official who is chair of the Task Force. “The ecolabel project is an innovative part of the team’s broader involvement in fostering sustainable consumption and production in Africa.”

Generally speaking, an ecolabel is a voluntary trademark awarded by a third party to products deemed less harmful to the environment than other products within the same category. As a market-based tool, it stimulates the supply and demand for products with a reduced environmental impact.

If applied to the African forestry sector, for example, which supplies upscale buyers in Western Europe with high-quality flooring and furniture, an ecolabel would certify that wood had been harvested in a sustainable manner, without the use of destructive clear-cutting practices. It would also show that forests had been managed using strict social criteria that respected indigenous communities.

Educating the consumer in this way both meets demand for such information, and protects precious resources and lifestyles, a huge consideration for sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 59 per cent of the population depends on woodlands for survival.

Applied to several sectors, a regional ecolabel would inform consumers about greener choices. For producers, it could offer marketing advantages of enhanced reputation and branding, and distinguish exports in booming international markets for environmentally preferable products.

Implementing the scheme in Africa in coming years would depend, in part, on adapting existing infrastructure and institutions, explains Josephine Bauer, who works in the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Regional Office for Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. Among the challenges: a need for technical expertise and increased financial muscle.

Despite such constraints, the plans have been endorsed by the African Union. “That gives us opportunity to proceed,” explains Mr. Cleo Migiro, a leading member of the African Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production, which is involved in the Task Force. “At the political level, this is an accepted way of moving.” The scheme has also received support from the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, an association of African environmental ministers who discuss plans to promote environmental protection.

Other Task Force members include Germany’s Federal Environmental Agency; Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation; UNIDO; UNEP and the Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production.