Hazelnuts are popular all over the world. Most of them come from one single country: Turkey. However, production there can be associated with considerable social risks. Thousands of harvest workers, mostly seasonal migrant workers and their families, are exposed to a range of difficult working conditions. These include factors such as child labour, low wages, excessively long working hours and substandard accommodation during the harvest season. Moreover, supply chain transparency and traceability are another problem for Turkish hazelnuts, as they usually pass through several intermediate trading and processing stages.
Hazelnuts are one of the most critical raw material for HALBA in terms of quantity. Most of the nuts required come from Turkey, from where HALBA buys exclusively Rainforest Alliance certified hazelnuts. This standard prohibits child labor. However, no certification system is able to completely guarantee that a product is free from child labour. As a result, HALBA also focuses on enhancing transparency and traceability in order to minimise risks associated with Turkish hazelnut cultivation still further. From 2024, HALBA will evaluate various Turkish suppliers with the support of an accredited team of auditors from the Fair Labour Association (FLA) regarding the working conditions of harvest workers in the field. In future, a portion of HALBA’s Turkish hazelnuts will be sourced from those suppliers who performed best in the evaluation. An additional strategy to minimise risks in hazelnut farming is to build up alternative supply chains, i.e. to look for other countries of cultivation with substantially lower social risks. This is why HALBA sources some of its hazelnuts from Italy and North Macedonia. The partnership with Nelkoski Organic Food is one example of this. HALBA works with the Coop Sustainability Fund to support the hazelnut producer Nelkoski Organic Food with integrating additional small-scale producers into the project and thereby attain solid growth and profitability. The processing infrastructure is being expanded with the aim of boosting the quality and quantity of organic hazelnuts from North Macedonia as an alternative to supplies from Turkey. An initial pilot project for dynamic agroforestry with hazelnuts was launched in 2024.
