The 22 Fyffes-owned sites in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Ecuador have begun the rollout of the specially developed HERessentials, an online gender equality program developed by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR).
The program has been adapted for the Latin American cultural context by Fyffes, according to a news release. The company’s goal is that all of its Fyffes employees in Latin American sites will benefit from gender equality programs by 2025, in addition to 50% of its suppliers by 2030.
Under its first Human Rights Impact Assessment, conducted at the end of 2019, Fyffes identified gender discrimination and gender-based violence as one of 13 salient human rights risks faced by the company and its people due to the context in which it operates, the release said.
To mitigate this risk, Fyffes has prioritized gender equality, along with eliminating any gender pay gap within its operations by 2030.
“I am delighted with the uptake of the gender equality program (HERessentials) on our farms and the feedback we have received from participants,” Fyffes Sustainability Manager Stella Davis said in the release. “We are fortunate to have many women working in our banana, pineapple and melon farms who make a valuable contribution to our business. For many reasons, not unique to Latin America, women struggle to progress within organizations and one of the best ways to tackle this is raising awareness and training all our employees, men and women, on gender equality.”
Fyffes began its first gender equality program at its Honduran melon farm Suragroh and Costa Rican pineapple farm Anexco in 2019. Since then, the program has been adapted to make it possible to deliver during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the release said.
