Roland Waardenburg
Note: The Mali mango project successfully exported mangos to Albert Heijn stores in the Netherlands in mid-summer. After Simon-Jan’s return to the Netherlands, Roland Waardenburg resumes ’A Weblog from Africa. Roland iis Director for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at Ahold, overseeing its global CSR policy and cooperating with international stakeholders in order to facilitate the combination of profit, planet and people in the Dutch company's business.
No, I am not going to talk about Scotland, or The Last King of Scotland – the recent film that has done very well. What I am talking about is Schokland, a purely Dutch piece of the earth.
Schokland was a peninsula that by the 15th century had become an island. Occupied and then abandoned as the sea encroached, it had to be evacuated in 1859. But following the draining of the Zuider Zee (The Zuider Sea to those of you who don’t speak Dutch), it has, since the 1940s, formed part of the land reclaimed from the sea.
Schokland has vestiges of human habitation going back to prehistoric times. It symbolizes the heroic, age-old struggle of the people of the Netherlands against the encroachment of the ocean’s waters.
Schokland is an Unesco World Heritage site and was most recently host to the Agreement of Schokland last Saturday. The Agreement of Schokland is all about realizing the United Nations’ millenium goals related to reducing poverty and increasing sustainable trade. Albert Heijn signed the agreement on promoting sustainable trade together with the FNV and CNV, the two leading unions in the Netherlands, along with the Nature Foundation, our good old development partner ICCO and the ministers for Development Cooperation and Agriculture.
After the signing of the agreement I had an interesting conservation with Bert Koenders, the Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation, about challenging each other to use this agreement to act rather than to talk.
Albert Heijn and ICA are already doing their utmost to make sure we create sustainable trade relations for all products we buy from Latin America, Africa and Asia. That is a long process, but we will make it work!