06 July 2021

Thank you for the opportunity to respond.

Mars has undertaken a radical simplification of our palm oil supply chain, reducing the number of mills our Tier 1 suppliers source from 1500 to fewer than 100 by 2021, with a glidepath to further halve that in 2022 – part of our Palm Positive Plan.

Mars has been on a journey to map our entire palm oil supply chain since 2015 and published its first mill list in 2018. Through our Palm Positive Plan, we have complete traceability to the mills from which our palm oil is sourced. We can confirm that neither RESPA nor Grupo Hame are included in our the mill lists used by our Tier 1 suppliers.

Mars is committed to the protection of communities, human rights defenders and workers in the palm oil industry. Since 2017, we have worked with Verité and our supplier Wilmar to explore how businesses across the palm oil supply chain can better understand, address and prevent human rights risks, with a focus on forced labor. Verité published a detailed case study of insights from this work in 2020. We funded additional work with Verité to launch a new, customized online toolkit in 2021, equipping palm oil producers across the sector with practical guidance to design and manage their own effective due diligence systems.

We have also begun to develop longer-term, supplier-driven initiatives to reduce human rights risks, including those related to forced labor, with other key suppliers in Malaysia and in Brazil, and will continue this approach across our supply chain. As we continue this stepped-up engagement, we’re committed to sharing our learnings along the way through regular public updates and engagement in industry forums. We continue to support the Consumer Goods Forum palm oil working group, which commissioned research to identify risks of forced labor in the palm sector in Indonesia and Malaysia in 2018. Insights from the report are informing where we prioritize action, including collaborative work on human rights due diligence systems in the palm oil sector.