Joost Oorthuizen: EU needs to align investments in sustainable production

Here’s one reason Joost Oorthuizen was at the 2012 European Development Days: to lobby the European Union for a harmonized financing mechanism for sustainable production and market demand for commodities like cocoa.

Oorthuizen, executive director of Sustainable Trade Initiative, spoke to Devex President Raj Kumar on the fringes of the 2012 European Development days. He said “it doesn’t make sense” that there are 368 cocoa projects in West Africa, yet there are only 10 companies producing chocolate.

Aligning donor investments is one challenge he sees in scaling up his organization’s partnership model to steer markets toward sustainable production and consumption. The Sustainable Trade Initiative, or IDH, manages a €105 million ($136.7 million) match funding grant from the Dutch government to leverage private sector investments in sustainable market transformation.

Watch the conversation between Kumar and Oorthuizen on public-private partnerships, part of a series of conversations we video-taped with global development leaders in the center of the action at last week’s EDD.

 Check out our complete coverage of European Development Days 2012.