Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains

This research paper introduces a "middle ground" approach to agricultural supply chain transparency using the SEI-PCS tool, which combines sub-national production data with customs data to link specific production landscapes to importing countries and supply chain actors.

• Existing sustainability assessments of agricultural commodity supply chains are limited because they rely on macro-scale footprint accounts, life-cycle analyses, or fine-scale traceability systems, which are either too coarse, fail to identify individual actors, or are too expensive for consistent regional implementation.
• The proposed middle-ground approach improves supply chain governance by providing higher spatial resolution of production regions to better account for geographic variability in risk and performance, and by identifying key actors—including producers, traders, shippers, and consumers—to enable more coordinated and cost-effective interventions.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2016). Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains. https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains. 2016. https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains |date=23 March 2016 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2016balancing, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2016}, month = mar, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }