On Monday, June 27, 2022, Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Co-operative Union (Headquarters: Shinjuku City, Tokyo, Chairperson: Mr. Murakami Shoichi, hereafter “Seikatsu Club”) published a message in the national morning edition of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper to express the hope for “A society where no one is left behind. That means everyone, including future children.”

Seikatsu Club is a food delivery co-op with a membership of about 420,000 people. Since the founding of the cooperative in 1968, Seikatsu Club has connected producers and consumers in many regions and has delivered trustworthy food ingredients to the dining tables of the members through a collective purchase system. We are currently promoting the “Connecting Local SDGs” initiative that connects together communities and people to expand the circle of recycling and coexistence in food, the environment, energy, and welfare.

At the 33rd Annual General Meeting (AGM), held on June 23, 2022, a resolution was passed to adopt the 7th Seikatsu Club Co-operative Consumers’ Union Medium-Term Business Plan, with promotion of the Connecting Local SDGs initiative as its centerpiece. Our society and the Earth are now facing limits such as disasters and crop failures caused by the climate crisis. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has prompted immense changes in our lifestyles and values. At this major turning point in time, the Connecting Local SDGs initiative provides answers to the questions of how to make choices as consumers and how we should create the society we wish to see. We will continue to promote even further the self-sufficiency and recycling in food, energy, and welfare that we have promoted thus far, and we will also gather opinions from a wide variety of people regarding the outcomes of new issues, using our wisdom to the fullest extent to move forward toward solutions.

The AGM also adopted the “Seikatsu Club 2030 Action Declaration.” Consisting of 11 Priority Goals covering a wide range of areas, including the promotion of food self-sufficiency, countermeasures to the climate crisis, reducing the use of plastics, and gender equality, the declaration lays out concrete actions to be implemented by Seikatsu Club up to the year 2030. Numerical targets will be set for the realization of these goals, and we will conduct annual inspections each fiscal year as we aim for the realization of a society where no one is left behind.

Promoting the Connecting Local SDGs initiative will be hard to implement through the power of Seikatsu Club alone, and the cooperation of a wide variety of people will be necessary. Through this newspaper advertisement, we hope that as many people as possible will understand the Seikatsu Club message and will work together with us to move forward to create new social mechanisms.


Creating a Society Where No One is Left Behind with Friends We Can Share Our Thoughts with
Mr. Murakami Shoichi, Chairperson of the Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Co-operative Union

Mr. Murakami Shoichi was appointed Chairperson of the Board of Directors at the 33rd AGM held on Thursday, June 23, 2022, and at the first meeting of the Board of Directors for FY2022. We would like to introduce here the future that Seikatsu Club is aiming for based on the Seikatsu Club 2030 Action Declaration and the 7th Seikatsu Club Co-operative Consumers’ Union Medium-Term Business Plan, which were adopted at the AGM.

 

■Three New Goals that Represent Even More Difficult Challenges
Seikatsu Club has recently added three new goals to the eight Priority Goals formulated in 2019: Priority Goal 4: Climate and disaster crisis countermeasures; Priority Goal 9: The realization of gender equality and diverse working styles; and Priority Goal 10: Environmental conservation in partnership with other organizations. While problem awareness has existed for some time on all of these issues, since we have consistently focused on deepening discussions, we felt that this was the appropriate time to set targets for these goals. In this Action Declaration, we have set concrete targets for 2030 that stand on the basis Seikatsu Club has built up over the past 50 years, and which approach the challenges that we have not yet been able to address despite our awareness of them as issues. We intend to go forward toward meeting these targets by continuing to monitor our progress each year.

■Using Seikatsu Club Mechanisms to Find Solutions to Global Issues
Our basic policy for tackling the global climate crisis is to promote energy conservation, to propose lifestyles that minimize CO2 emissions, and to expand the use of renewable energy. Electricity consumption is the largest source of CO2 emissions from households, but these emissions can be greatly reduced by implementing a transition from electricity generation based mainly on fossil fuels to electricity generated from renewable energy sources. We are presently calling for a shift to Seikatsu Club Electricity※, whose renewable energy sources account for more than 80% of procured power. To address the issue of plastic waste, as well as continuing and further developing our bottle reuse system, an initiative we have been working on for many years, we will also make efforts to utilize “petroleum-free plastics” for containers and packaging. Regarding gender equality, we believe that the first step will be to promote women’s participation in policymaking. At present, the ratio of women members of the House of Representatives is a miserable 9.7%. We intend to support not only political action but also diverse working styles such as workers collectives in order to boost the social impact of women’s voices.
※Supplied by Seikatsu Club Energy, of which Seikatsu Club is the parent company.

■Expanding the Circle of Recycling and Coexistence by Connecting People, Communities, and Resources for the Next Generation
The COVID-19 crisis and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has surely caused many people to realize that self-sufficiency in food and energy is a top priority issue that touches on the very foundation of the country. In Japan, however, aging and depopulation in agricultural, livestock, fishery, and forestry production areas continue unabated. We now see that free trade, such as proposed under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), also known as TPP11, was promoted in the midst of globalization, while the decline of rural areas accelerated.

The goals of the Seikatsu Club 2030 Action Declaration are to form organic links between regional functions and resources, and to supplement any scarce resources with resources from other regions. The Connecting Local SDGs initiative is a method for achieving these goals. Sustainable production areas are created through collective purchase, which realizes autonomous connections between producers and Seikatsu Club members, and between urban areas and production areas, and by creating functions (building bases for renewable energy and community welfare, and the provision of workplaces) required by communities through the pooling of money, human resources, and knowledge. We intend to continue to promote such activities in the future.