Sustainability reporting as a tool for fostering sustainable growth in the agri-food sector: the case of Spain

Abstract

The impact of business activity is of increasing concern to European Union citizens. In response, Directive 2014/95/EU becomes the first supranational regulation that requires companies to report business impacts on social and environmental sustainability using sustainability reports (SR). This study aims to analyse the quantity of sustainability information disclosed by Spanish agri-food companies with respect to the requirements established in Directive 2014/95/EU. In order to achieve this, a content analysis is applied to 30 SR following Global Reporting Initiative – GRI – Standards and published after the transposition of the Directive into Spanish regulation. Our findings show a generally low level of reporting, and most of the analysed SR fails to reliably document the information at indicator level. Indeed, the level of disclosure slightly increases for less material information, such as that related to social local communities and employees. Consequently, Spanish agri-food companies should start to make more of an effort to ensure that the information disclosed is complete and of high quality.

Keywords:

• sustainability reporting
• social and environmental accounting
• corporate social responsibility
• agri-food sector
• directive 2014/95/EU

Acknowledgements

The authors are particularly grateful to the anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on the previous versions of the paper. They also acknowledge the valuable helpful from Mercedes Luque-Vílchez.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2022.2115346.

Notes

1 The information analysed refers to the year-end date (31 December) of the corresponding years 2018, 2019 and 2020.

2 SABI (Iberian Balance Sheet Analysis System) is an exclusive web tool developed by INFORMA in collaboration with Bureau Van Dijk, which allows users to easily and quickly access the general information and annual accounts of Spanish and Portuguese companies.

3 ${\mathit{Indicator} \mathit{Disclosure}}_i={ID}_i= \frac{{\sum }_{i=1}^j{I}_i}{j}\times 100$

4 ${\mathit{Sub}-\mathit{block} \mathit{Disclosure}}_i={SB}_i= \frac{{\sum }_{i=1}^n{ID}_i}{\mathit{nID}}\times 100$

5 ${\mathit{Block} \mathit{Disclosure}}_i={BD}_i= \frac{{\sum }_{i=1}^k\mathit{SBi}}{\mathit{kSB}}\times 100$

6 ${\mathit{Mean} \mathit{Disclosure}}_i={MD}_i= \frac{{\sum }_{i=1}^l\mathit{BDi}}{\mathit{lBD}}\times 100$

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge support from SEJ-649 EAARN Research Group.