Just when you thought you had seen it all, you switch on the television and find that Tony Blair is celebrating his last full day in office by holding a news conference with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And lets face it when Mr Blair swept into power back in 1997 very few of us would have predicted that the man who so ably played the role of the Terminator would 1) have been the Governor of California and 2) been one of the British Prime Minister’s final diary appointments.

But then few would have predicted much of what has occurred since. And as the North of England struggles to cope with rising floodwaters and businesses begin counting the cost of what has been the biggest environmental disaster in the UK for a number of years – mirroring similar ‘summer’ scenes across Europe since the start of the millennium – yesterday did seem a remarkably apt time for Arnie and Tony to get together and discuss climate change.

Schwarzenegger recently called for politicians to make the environment “hip and sexy” – although it must be said that in his garish green suit Arnie looked neither – and his state is currently leading the way when it comes to tackling climate change across the pond (he last year signed a law that set California a target of cutting carbon emissions by 25% by 2020).

And although Arnie has his knockers both across the pond and in Europe, his attitude to corporate responsibility has been widely applauded and with the environmentalist movement desperately looking for a figurehead maybe Schwarzenegger, who lets face it, despite the mockery, has been pretty successful at whatever he has turned his giant hands to, could provide one.

He claims he has already carried out a similar change in public perceptions to bodybuilding and if he continues banging the climate change drum maybe even George Bush will start listening.

As for Mr Blair, it’s likely he had other things on his mind yesterday - judging by the number of removal vans ferrying to and from 10 Downing Street this morning he would have spent much of the time before Schwarzenegger’s arrival packing up boxes.

And after 10 long years that’s hardly surprising. After all, he didn’t want to keep Gordon Brown waiting any longer did he.

Back in April ELP reported the long running dispute between the world’s most famous coffee house, Starbucks and Ethiopian farmers, showed no signs of being resolved.

Well now I’m pleased to say, whilst enthusiastically sipping from a tall cappuccino, that it has bean.

The row, which erupted when Starbucks opposed plans to trademark some of the East African country’s most famous coffee brands, finally came to an end when the Seattle-based company agreed to acknowledge Ethiopian ownership of Yirgacheffe, Harrar and Sidamo, regardless of whether they were registered or not.

All of which should be good news for Ethiopian farmers who live, very often, in extreme poverty, despite the premium prices their coffees attract in foreign markets.

“A milestone”, was how the director general of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office described the deal. However, whilst Starbucks executives give themselves a self-congratulatory pat on the back, fair-trade campaigners may take some convincing of the agreement’s worth.

The hope is the trademarking will boost demand and lead to higher prices, but with Ethiopian farmers not receiving any royalty payments from the deal, it’s hard to see how their everyday lot will be improved - fair-trade rightly point to the fact that the trademarking of the coffee in Japan, Canada and Europe has had little or no impact to date.

If this new agreement fails to raise living standards, then for the average Ethiopian farmer the long-awaited signature on the bottom line, won’t be worth the paper its written on.

Life is far from sweet for one of Britain’s most famous companies.

On Monday of this week Cadbury’s announced it was planning to cut 15% of its global workforce in a bid to sustain the profitability of the business . The company, that was set up to sell tea and coffee in 1824, will next month find out what penalty it faces in the aftermath of the highly publicised salmonella outbreak in the UK last summer.

The scare, which led to almost one million bars of its chocolate being recalled, was sufficient for Birmingham City Council - who police health and safety at the company’s Bournville site in the midlands where the chocolate-making process is completed - to prosecute Cadbury’s for the alleged sale of “unsafe” chocolate.

Cadbury’s also faced a prosecution from Herefordshire Council over charge relating to environmental health.

The verdicts, the first of which is expected on 24 July, are likely to raise some important questions concerning Cadbury’s supply chain and where the actual blame for the outbreak lies.

However, regardless of whether the salmonella outbreak originated in their Birmingham site or was passed on by one of their suppliers, Cadbury’s have said that the bill for dealing with the contamination is likely to top £30m. A total of which, as you would imagine, would be punishment enough.

However, the six offences the company are alleged to have committed in relation to Herefordshire Council’s prosecution carry a maximum penalty of an unlimited fine and/or two years imprisonment.

Although the chances of the company’s top executives facing a prison sentence is small (when I last looked , there were no more cells free anyway) the seriousness of the offences merely serves to demonstrate the importance of a robust and rigorously policed supply-chain.

Something which Cadbury’s are finding out to their considerable cost.

For a nation famed for its isolationist policies, companies in U.S. have embraced offshoring as readily as the rest of the world, but could that be about to change?

Earlier this week congress began a hearing on the impact that offshoring is having on the nation’s economy and, most pertinently, employment in the country. The hearing is headed by panel chairman, Bart Gordon, who caused controversy in 2004 when he opposed George Bush by pushing for the publication of a report by the U.S. Department of Commerce on offshore outsourcing that called for greater assessment of its potential impact.

Gordon has already issued a stern warning to firms in the US by claiming that the growth of offshoring could soon result in more Americans looking for jobs overseas in a shrinking employment market. The major fear of the committee is that outsourcing is now effecting not only manufacturing job in the U.S. but is beginning to pose a threat to white collar workers.

The first hearing, which concentrated on research and development, is one of a series termed by Gordon as “fact-finding explorations”, with the committee calling on some of America ’s leading policy analysts and industry representatives

The main crux of Congress’s investigation is that if the offshoring of many key business areas continued to grow the American economy may struggle to keep pace.

And although the findings of the remaining hearings are unclear, and are ultimately unlikely to have much of an impact on corporate policy across the pond, Congress seem determined to make sure that their voice is heard.

For any company embarking on an outsourcing initiative, squeezing every last drop of value out of the contract is paramount. And with research showing that ineffective governance may, on occasions, cause outsourcing buyers to lose 20% of the value of the relationship, it’s the sort of problem that can bring on bouts of executive insomnia.

Help, however, may soon be at hand. Last week, EquaTerra, the sourcing advisory firm, announced the launch of a new Governance Healthcheck designed to ensure that outsourcing buyers and service providers pull in the same, and not entirely opposite, directions.

And although the service may come too late to help the companies who have billions of pounds worth of outsourcing contracts up for renewal in the next 12 months, the new subscription-based service could prevent many of those companies from making the same mistakes again.

The governance healthchecks, which take place twice a year in order to continually monitor the success, or otherwise, of the contract is, according to the company’s managing director, Liz Campbell “like low-cost but full coverage insurance for outsourcing relationship satisfaction.”

Like personal relationship guidance, however, Campbell believes that for the process to work, both sides must be committed to the process. Failure to “devote time and resources to jointly improve results,” is likely to have a negative impact, eventually resulting in more wasted money and resources.

If the two do work together though, there’s no reason why problems such as service reporting and delivery can’t be identified at an early stage and tackled before they become potentially critical issues.

“Unlike immature governance benchmarking offerings, Governance Healthcheck results in an integrated, customized and focused action plan with committed results,” Campbell said.

Among the key aims of EquaTerra’s new offering are; to identify the root causes of relationship dissatisfaction; realign expectations; and provide early warning of upcoming trouble.

Although the Governance Healthcheck has only just been launched, two clients have already implemented the programme. Just how they’re getting on will remain a mystery until a webcast in mid-July but it promises to make entertaining listening.

Will buyer and supplier still be on speaking terms or will outsourcing’s answer to marriage guidance have come up trumps? Watch this space.

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Spending on supply chain technology is set to hit an all time high, that’s the message from a new report by the Aberdeen Group focusing on how companies are using the latest developments to stay one step ahead of the competition.

“The Supply Chain Innovator’s Technology Footprint 2007”, examined the plans of 210 enterprises earlier this year and found five times as many companies were planning to spend more on supply chain technology over the next 12 months than were planning to spend less.

The companies involved in the study were split into three categories according to their supply chain ambitions and on the amount they intend to spend on supply chain technology.

Of the three, Strivers were defined as companies attempting to hit the industry average through their supply chain technology roadmap; Best Practice Seekers were those companies who were actively seeking to adopt industry best practices and supporting technology; and Innovators were those looking outside the traditional parameters to create new supply chain innovations, with the research indicating that companies within this group were one-and-a-half times more likely to name globalisation as their top driver for supply chain improvements.

The report illustrated the major differences between those in the top performing categories and those languishing at the bottom. According to Aberdeen, in comparison with their peers, innovators were way ahead in areas such as the prioritisation of pricing optimisation and strategic network design.

The report detailed inventory management had taken over from sales and operations planning, as many companies top priority in 2007, closely followed by supply chain visibility. It seems then solutions providers, along with those playing catch-up, are in for a busy second half in 2007.

India may be still be streets ahead of the Chinese when it comes to being a favoured offshoring destination but the Indian government has followed their competitor’s example by announcing that 24 Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are to be set up in the country.

The plans, which have already been backed by some of the country’s most influential companies, including Wipro, were given final approval today.

The idea follows the introduction of similar tax-free zones in China , where they are seen as a way of promoting trade and securing continued foreign investment.

So far nine SEZs have been approved – subject to further scrutiny – whilst 13 applications have been deferred. If the Indian government were expecting the new zones to be welcomed widely, however, they have been left sorely disappointed.

The ethics of the new plans, however, have been slammed in some quarters by those who feel that all the zones will succeed in achieving is heightening tensions between corporate India and the country’s huge farming population.

And whilst the country’s commerce minister, Kamal Nath, believes that SEZs will act as “engines of growth”, human rights groups, claim that the large scale displacements and loss of livelihoods caused by the creation of the zones will cause huge humanitarian problems.

Speaking to the ethical corporation, Medha Patkar, a human rights activist in the country said: “The government is distributing land to private companies which is against the farmers and workers of the country.”

Other concerns focus on claims that the companies operating within the SEZs will be exempt from freedom or association, collective bargaining rules and the Environment Protection Act. Campaigners also say that companies will be able to hire and fire at will.

Such is the strength of feeling that recent clashes between protestors and state police over the proposals have even led to deaths in some areas.

All of which leaves the Indian government with something of a headache, and although the zones will undoubtedly enhance the country’s burgeoning reputation as a location for some of the world’s leading BPO specialists, it’s clear that a huge amount of work still remains to be done if the rest of the population are to be convinced of their merits.

If ever evidence was needed that Corporate Social Responsibility is getting ‘sexy’, then it has been provided by one of the world’s biggest sportswear firms, Nike.

Six months ago Nike kicked a Pakistan-based football supplier into touch for flouting its code of conduct - now the company are back sourcing footballs from the country after being satisfied that Silver Star, a company from the northern tip of Pakistan’s Punjab province, have met Nike’s strict ethical specifications.

Under the new agreement, all Silver Star workers must be registered full time employees and all must receive social benefits of some description. Furthermore, all workers will have the right to unionise and collectively bargain.

"We hope this is the beginning of broader, positive systemic change for workers, and that the example Silver Star sets will help Pakistan’s soccer ball industry create a new model of responsible, globally competitive manufacturing" said Mark Parker, Nike's President and CEO.

Nike expects to place its first orders later this summer and, if successful, the balls used at many Premiership matches next season will be ethically produced and come straight from the Sialkot plant.

Not content to stop there, the Oregon-based company’s annual corporate responsibility report states that they are making strenuous efforts to cut down the amount of overtime carried out in their 700 contract factories over the next four years.

The company, who employ an estimated 800,000 workers worldwide, had received criticism in 2005 after claims emerged of poor working conditions at some of their plants.

Something Nike’s chief executive Mark Parker is keen to tackle: "We see corporate responsibility as a catalyst for growth and innovation," he said.

"It is an integral part of how we can use the power of our brand and the scale of our business to create meaningful change."

Nike has also pledged to become “climate neutral” by 2011 after setting itself new targets for reducing waste.

All of which, of course, comes in a week when US President George Bush, finally made some positive noises over greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe it’s just coincidence, or maybe Nike’s most famous devotee, Michael Jordan, had a word in his ear.