Standard Revision Working Group
The revision of the Bonsucro Production Standard continues to pick up speed with the appointment of members of the Standard Revision Working Group (SRWG).
The group’s responsibilities include:
- Approves the Standard Revision terms of reference
- Discusses and makes recommendations on development work
- Analyses and consolidates inputs from stakeholders
- Takes decisions on the content of the Standard at the indicator level
- Approves draft versions of Bonsucro Standards.
The appointments were made by Bonsucro’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB). Thank you to everyone who submitted an application.
| Name | Company | Title | Country | More info |
| Cristina C. López | Fundacion del Otro | Consultant | Argentina | Biography |
| Robert Quirk | N/A | Australian Farmer | Australia | Biography |
| Danielle Lima | Control Union | Technical Manager | Brazil | Biography |
| Luiz Iaquinta | Brookfield Asset Management | Vice President | Brazil | Biography |
| Miguel Tejada Iraizoz | Independent Consultant | Consultant | Colombia | Biography |
| Ruth Ascencio | N/A | Independent Consultant | Honduras | Biography |
| Olivia Scholtz | HCV Network | Senior Project Manager | UK | Biography |
| Kendyl Salcito | NomoGaia | Executive Director | USA | Biography |
| Ilana Weiss | La Isla Network | Senior Director of policy and Public Health | USA | Biography |
| Mario Amador (Members' Council representative) | CNPA | President | Nicaragua | Biography |
Biographies
Cristina C. López
Cristina Lopez is a consultant at Fundacion del Otro, a non-governmental organisation specialised in social responsibility and sustainability. She has worked on projects for UNDP, Oxfam Novib, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, IDB, Federal Investment Council, GCABA, among others.
Cristina is a Certified Public Accountant, a SMETA social auditor and a member of the Strategic Committee for Social Responsibility of IRAM (Argentine Standardization Body), the Strategic Environment Committee IRAM, and finally the Argentine OECD PNC Advisory Board.
Robert Quirk
Robert is a sugarcane farmer from Australia. In 2011, Robert Quirk was awarded the Sugar Research and Development Corporations, an award for research and service to the Australian sugar industry. The award recognised his research and for implementing innovative research and development on farms.
His research activities were highly commended. He has been actively involved in more than 16 industry-relevant committees and has been the recipient of over seven industry-specific awards for influential research and sustained leadership. He has dedicated his time to improving the sugar industry through forward-thinking innovation and persistence. As founding chair of Bonsucro, Robert helped to put together the first Bonsucro Production Standard in 2007-8.
Danielle Lima
Danielle Lima, from Brazil, graduated in Forestry Engineering and Agronomic Engineering, and has been working with sustainability schemes since 2010.She has been working with the Bonsucro Standard since 2011, and has had the opportunity to meet with mills in Central and South America and has also been in contact with mills in the Asia. Working with a standard applied to mills around the world is a challenge, but also an opportunity to improve the quality of life of those involved, as well as monitoring mill processes so that they become more competitive and value-adding (not exclusively monetary) in their activities.
Danielle is the Bonsucro Certification Manager for Control Union – one of the 5 licensed Certification Bodies.
Luiz Iaquinta
Luiz Iaquinta is the Quality, Certification, Healthy and Safety and Environmental Director at Fazendas Bartira, a Brazilian agricultural company with more than 40 years of operating expertise in cattle, sugarcane, soybean, corn and rubber trees and a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management.
Luiz has more than 20 years of experience in internal audit, compliance, certifications and sustainability initiatives developed in real estate, the beverage and textile industries and consultancy firms. He is currently leading the project to certify several production units in six different Brazilian estates, totalizing more than three hundred thousand hectares in scope.
Marionne Lips (TAB representative)
Miguel Tejada
Miguel Tejada is an economist, holding an MSc in Macroeconomics with an emphasis in sustainable standards in agriculture in palm oil and sugarcane production in Latin America. Over the last ten years, Miguel has become familiar with standards like RSPO, ISCC and Bonsucro from the field, the workers, the communities in the region. In the last six years, he has visited more than thirty companies while providing services for sustainability certifications to growers, mills, refineries, biofuel plants and traders understanding in a very practical way what these standards mean and what their real impacts are.
Peter Allsopp (TAB representative)
Ruth Ascencio
Ruth has more than 20 years of experience in the food industry, mainly advising agro-industrial companies in the implementation of quality management, safety and sustainability systems such as ISO-9001, FSSC-22000 and Bonsucro as a Certified Auditor of the Bonsucro Standard and Lead Auditor in the ISO 9001 and FSSC 22000.
In 2012 she began working in the sugarcane industry, coordinating the different certification in a Honduran Mill (AZUNOSA), resulting in the first Bonsucro certified mill in Central America.
Nitin Kayande
Nitin currently works in Baramati Agro Ltd, a multi-functional company mostly dealing in agro-produce processing as Deputy Manager in Quality Assurance and Systems department. Nitin was born and brought up in a small village of Maharashtra in India in an agricultural background family. He holds a Bachelor of Technology in Food Science and has almost 9 years’ work experience in a diverse number of food industries.
He has additional responsibility of Corporate Management Representative. As part of this, he deals with systems certifications like ISO9001, ISO14000, ISO18000, ISO45000, FSSC including community standards like Halal and Kosher. He also looks after effective implementation of social standards like Bonsucro, Smeta6, SGP etc.
Pat Brenchley
Pat guides and assists RCL Foods’ agricultural operations to achieve Bonsucro compliance and certification, in Malalane, South Africa. He is by trade a sugarcane agronomist, having spent 32 years either farming or working with growers from southern Africa and India.
Some of his highlights have included capacity building in sugarcane out grower development schemes and being involved in the early work of the Better Sugarcane Initiative (BSI, the forerunner to Bonsucro) as well as piloting, implementing and auditing sustainability and food safety standards and systems. Pat has developed an interest in risk management and sustainability reporting and feedback mechanisms that are accurate, yet easy to implement. He would like to see the sugar industries adopting a management system that ensures sustainability and leads to continuous improvement.
Olivia Scholtz
Olivia is Senior Project Manager, HCV Resource Network. She joined the HCV Network after many years of managing landscape-level conservation projects mostly in Africa, but also in South America and Australia. She is an expert in wildlife protection and monitoring and brought these skills to HCV assessments in Central Africa. Before formally joining the HCV Network Secretariat team, Olivia supported the Network as a Quality Panel Member conducting the quality control of HCV Assessments, and providing training for HCV practitioners.
Now her projects focus on working with Standards to adopt and implement the HCV Approach. She was heavily involved in the Better Cotton Initiative collaboration to develop smallholder-adapted HCV procedures and biodiversity management tools. She is a Member of the Soil Association’s Standards Board as the HCV and forestry expert. Other roles with the HCV Network include the development of tools and guidance for HCV Identification, Management and Monitoring, and ongoing support to quality assurance. Olivia has a Masters and PhD in Tropical Ecology from the Natural History Museum, Imperial College and Plymouth University.
Kendyl Salcito
Kendyl Salcito is the Executive Director of NomoGaia, a nonprofit research group focused on addressing the human rights impacts of multinational corporations. She has worked on human rights issues in agriculture, mining, petroleum, manufacturing and infrastructure sectors on five continents, including sugar research in several countries. Since 2018 she has served on both the Standards Committee and the Human Rights Working Group of the Aluminum Stewardship Initiative. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, an MA in Journalism from the University of British Columbia, and a BA in History from Princeton University.
Ilana Weiss
Ilana is Senior Director of Health and Policy at La Isla Network (LIN). In this role, Ilana has led some of the most important and insightful studies investigating Chronic Kidney Disease of undetermined causes (CKDu) among sugarcane workers in Central America. This work has led to the publication of numerous scientific papers in leading peer-reviewed journals and created a dynamic change in the way occupational health is addressed in the Latin American sugar industry.
Currently, she is the project lead for the research component of the Adelante Initiative–a groundbreaking collaboration between LIN, the San Antonio sugar mill, Bonsucro and the Nicaraguan Sugar Producers Association to evaluate, improve and implement evidence-based occupational health protections for manual sugarcane workers.
Ilana brings over a decade of experience working in multi-stakeholder, multicultural settings with a focus on designing, developing, and implementing the processes, structures, and collaborations necessary to strengthen occupational health, safety and human dignity for labourers. Ilana has dual-Masters degrees in Public Health and International Affairs from Columbia University.
Ineke (Catharina) Wesseling (TAB representative)
Mario Amador (MC representative)
