Leading food and beverage companies in the Philippines continue to push for a Sustainable Agriculture Initiative, which is now being adapted by more firms in their production processes, a press release from Nestle Philippines Inc. said.

At a follow-up meeting recently for last year's First SAI Platform-Philippine Convention, officials of Delfi Foods Inc., Golden Arches Development Corp., Unilever Phils., and Universal Robina Corp. informed the group that they are already implementing SAI-related programs.

These include Nestle's Experimental and Demonstration Farm, Unilever's Clean Water Campaign, and Coca-Cola's PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate, a recyclable material) bottle program.

But the participants agreed that more action need to be done and agreed to implement an awareness program among their own employees and partner companies, focusing on best practices and success stories of each participating company, the press release said.

They also plan to gather more companies, at least 15 core members, to put SAI objectives into practice.

SAI is a groundbreaking platform created by food industry giants Nestle, Danone and Unilever to actively support and promote sustainable agriculture.

The SAI platform aims to improve the quality, safety and nutritional value of agricultural products through concrete ways of increasing the produce's nutritional content and safeness arising from the farm, including cutting the risks of harmful residues.

It also addresses relevant issues such as improving the farmers' productivity through attractive farming livelihood programs, land and soil conservation, water conservation, power conservation, the press release added.*

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