Propuesta y evaluación de un proceso de certificación en sustentabilidad para pequeñas empresas de café en Ecuador

Abstract

The present project involves the design and assessment of a proposal for a sustainability certification for small coffee companies in Ecuador. Although there are certifications related to environmental protection in the country, there is still not a sustainability certification system that allows companies achieve several relevant aspects such as: economic growth, minimizing negative environmental impacts on the territory, promoting the development of human communities near the company surroundings or ensuring the company's workers well-being. The proposed certification has a total of 1530 points distributed among 79 evaluation parameters covering issues in the (i) environmental axis, (ii) social axis and (iii) economic axis; the proposal requires at least 70% of the score in each axis in order to be approved. After evaluating the proposal in a small specialty coffee company in the Northwest of Pichincha, a result of 58.5 / 100 points is obtained, a score that does not allow it to obtain any type of certification. The results of the proposal evaluation reflect that the greatest difficulty shown in the evaluation process for the companies is the verification of performance. Considering small or family businesses, most of them do not file documents in an organized and consistent way. Additionally, it was evidenced that no modification is required in the evaluation process, although it does require changes in some parameters that cannot be measured.