Starting Point

Violation of living and working conditions in the food system happens unfortunatly to a lot of people in the countries of food production – also in Bazil. As one of the biggest orange juice producer, Brazil produces half of the orange juice world wide.

Due to the fact, that Germany has the highest per capita juice consumption in the world and the fact, that the production contains social, ecological and economic issues, the Romero Initiative (CIR) co-founded PANAO in 2020 with the aim to advance the living and working conditions in the orange juice supply chain.

Main Problems

During the harvest the workers are often working in piecework, without protective clothing – especially against pesticides – and under high physical strain. Moreover the workers suffer violations of working hours and incomes that are often not sufficient to secure their livelihoods. These issues can only be solved together by different actors along the supply chain and that is what PANAO does.

What the partnership does

PANAO pools knowledge and resources and promotes dialogue between stakeholders to:

1. create sustainable sourcing practices by analyzing the orange juice supply chain.
2. create decent working conditions by analyzing working conditions and wages in order to then adjust them to a living wage.
3. create a strong employee representation by establishing a dialogue structure between employees and employers, which should enable negotiation processes between the two parties in the long term.
4. create fair political conditions by having a dialogue with its partners in Germany, Europe and Brazil to be able to influence political developments.