 |
A World Wide Fund poster promoting working
with business leaders to create "better businesses" |
Imagine an
international mega-deal. The global organic food industry agrees to support
international agribusiness in clearing as much tropical rainforest as they want
for farming. In return, agribusiness agrees to farm the now-deforested land
using organic methods, and the organic industry encourages its supporters to
buy the resulting timber and food under the newly devised “Rainforest Plus”
label. There would surely be an international outcry.
Virtually
unnoticed, however, even by their own membership, the world’s biggest wildlife
conservation groups have agreed to exactly such a scenario, only in reverse.
Led by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, still known as the World Wildlife
Fund in the United States), many of the biggest conservation nonprofits
including Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy have already
agreed to a series of global bargains with international agribusiness. In
exchange for vague promises of habitat protection, sustainability, and social justice,
these conservation groups are offering to greenwash industrial commodity
agriculture.
The big
conservation nonprofits don’t see it that way of course.
According to WWF’s “Vice
President for Market Transformation” Jason Clay, the new conservation strategy
arose from two fundamental realizations.
The first was that
agriculture and food production are the key drivers of almost every
environmental concern. From issues as diverse as habitat destruction to
over-use of water, from climate change to ocean dead zones, agriculture and
food production are globally the primary culprits. To take one example, 80-90%
of all fresh water extracted by humans is for agriculture, according to the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization’s “State of the World’s Land and Water”
report. This point was emphasized once again in a recent analysis published in
the scientific journal Nature. The lead author of this study was Professor
Jonathan Foley. Not only is Foley the director of the University of
Minnesota-based Institute on the Environment, but he is also a science board
member of the Nature Conservancy.
The second crucial
realization for WWF was that forest destroyers typically are not peasants with
machetes but national and international agribusinesses with bulldozers. It is
the latter who deforest tens of thousands of acres at a time. Land clearance on
this scale is an ecological disaster, but Claire Robinson of Earth Open Source points
out it is also “incredibly socially destructive,” as peasants are driven off
their land and communities are destroyed. According to the UN Permanent Forum
on Indigenous Issues, 60 million people worldwide risk losing their land and
means of subsistence from palm plantations. By about 2004, WWF had come to
recognize the true impacts of industrial agriculture. Instead of informing
their membership and initiating protests and boycotts, however, they embarked
on a partnership strategy they call “market transformation.”
Market
Transformation
With WWF leading
the way, the conservation nonprofits have negotiated approval schemes for “Responsible”
and “Sustainable” farmed commodity crops. According to WWF’s Clay, the plan is
to have agribusinesses sign up to reduce the 4-6 most serious negative impacts
of each commodity crop by 70-80%. And if enough growers and suppliers sign up,
then the Indonesian rainforests or the Brazilian Cerrado will be saved.
The ambition of
market transformation is on a grand scale. There are schemes for palm oil (the
Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil; RSPO), soybeans (the Round Table on
Responsible Soy; RTRS), biofuels (the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels),
Sugar (Bonsucro) and also for cotton, shrimp, cocoa and farmed salmon. These
are markets each worth many billions of dollars annually and the intention is
for these new “Responsible” and “Sustainable” certified products to dominate
them.
The reward for
producers and supermarkets will be that, reinforced on every shopping trip, “Responsible”
and “Sustainable” logos and marketing can be expected to have major effects on
public perception of the global food supply chain. And the ultimate goal is
that, if these schemes are successful, human rights, critical habitats, and
global sustainability will receive a huge and globally significant boost.
The role of WWF and
other nonprofits in these schemes is to offer their knowledge to negotiate
standards, to provide credibility, and to lubricate entry of certified products
into international markets. On its UK website, for example, WWF offers its
members the chance to “Save the Cerrado” by emailing supermarkets to buy “Responsible
Soy.” What WWF argues will be a major leap forward in environmental and social
responsibility has already started. “Sustainable” and “Responsible” products
are already entering global supply chains.
Reputational Risk
For conservation
nonprofits these plans entail risk, one of which is simple guilt by
association. The Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) scheme is typical of
these certification schemes. Its membership includes WWF, Conservation
International, Fauna and Flora International, the Nature Conservancy, and other
prominent nonprofits. Corporate members include repeatedly vilified members of
the industrial food chain. As of January 2012, there are 102 members, including
Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, Nestle, BP, and UK supermarket ASDA.
That is not the
only risk. Membership in the scheme, which includes signatures on
press-releases and sometimes on labels, indicates approval for activities that
are widely opposed. The RTRS, for example, certifies soybeans grown in
large-scale chemical-intensive monocultures. They are usually GMOs. They are
mostly fed to animals. And they originate in countries with hungry populations.
When, according to an ABC News poll, 52% of Americans think GMOs are unsafe and
93% think genetically modified organisms (GMOs) ought to be labeled, for
example, this is a risk most organizations dependent on their reputations
probably would not consider. The remedy for such reputational risk is high
standards, rigorous certification, and watertight traceability procedures. Only
credibility at every step can deflect the seemingly obvious suspicion that the
conservation nonprofits have been hoodwinked or have somehow “sold out.”
So, which one is
it? Are “Responsible” and “Sustainable” certifications indicative of a genuine
strategic success by WWF and its fellows, or are the schemes nothing more than
business as usual with industrial-scale greenwashing and a social-justice
varnish?
Low and Ambiguous
Standards
The Rountable on
Responsible Soy Standards
RTRS standards
(version 1, June 2010) cover five “principles.” Principle 1: Legal Compliance
and Good Business Practices. Principle 2: Responsible Labour Conditions.
Principle 3: Responsible Community Relations. Principle 4: Environmental
Responsibility. Principle 5: Good Agricultural Practice.
Language typical of
the standards includes, under Principle 2 (Responsible Labour Conditions),
section 2.1.1 states: “No forced, compulsory, bonded, trafficked, or otherwise
involuntary labor is used at any stage of production,” while section 2.4.4
states, “Workers are not hindered from interacting with external parties
outside working hours.” Under Principle 3 (Responsible Community Relations),
section 3.3.3 states: “Any complaints and grievances received are dealt with in
a timely manner.”
Under Principle 4
(Environmental Responsibility), section 4.2 states: “Pollution is minimized and
production waste is managed responsibly,” and section 4.4 states: “Expansion of
soy cultivation is responsible.”
Under Principle 5
(Good Agricultural Practice), Section 5.9 states: “Appropriate measures are
implemented to prevent the drift of agrochemicals to neighboring areas.”
The first place to
look is the standards themselves. The language from the RTRS standards (see
sidebar), to stick with the case of soy, illustrates the tone of the RTRS
principles and guidance. There are two ways to read these standards. The
generous interpretation is to recognize that the sentiments expressed are
higher than what is actually practiced in many countries where soybeans are
grown, in that the standards broadly follow common practice in Europe or North
America. Nevertheless, they are far lower than organic or fair-trade standards;
for example, they don’t require crop rotation, or prohibit pesticides. Even a
generous reading also needs to acknowledge the crucial point that adherence to
similar requirements in Europe and North America has contaminated wells,
depleted aquifers, degraded rivers, eroded the soil, polluted the oceans,
driven species to extinction, and depopulated the countryside—to mention only a
few well-documented downsides.
There is also a
less generous interpretation of the standards. Much of the content is either in
the form of statements, or it is merely advice. Thus section 4.2 reads: “Pollution
is minimized and production waste is managed responsibly.” Imperatives, such
as: “must,” “may never,” “will,” etc., are mostly lacking from the document.
Worse, key terms such as “pollution,” “minimized,” “responsible,” and “timely”
(see sidebar) are left undefined. This chronic vagueness means that both
certifiers and producers possess effectively infinite latitude to implement or
judge the standards. They could never be enforced, in or out of court.
Dubious
Verification and Enforcement
Unfortunately, the
flaws of RTRS certification do not end there. They include the use of an
internal verification system. The RTRS uses professional certifiers, but only
those who are members of RTRS. This means that the conservation nonprofits are
relying on third parties for compliance information. It also means that only
RTRS members can judge whether a principle was adhered to. Even if they
consider it was not, there is nothing they can do, since the RTRS has no legal
status or sanctions.
The “culture” of
deforestation is also important to the standards. Rainforest clearance is often
questionably legal, or actively illegal, and usually requires removing existing
occupants from the land. It is a world of private armies and bribery. This
operating environment makes very relevant the irony under which RTRS members,
under Principle 1, volunteer to obey the law. The concept of volunteering to
obey the law invites more than a few questions. If an organization is not
already obeying the law, what makes WWF suppose that a voluntary code of
conduct will persuade it? And does obeying the law meaningfully contribute to a
marketing campaign based on responsibility?
Of equal concern is
the absence of a clear certification trail. Under the “Mass Balance” system
offered by RTRS, soybeans (or derived products) can be sold as “Responsible”
that were never grown under the system. Mass Balance means vendors can transfer
the certification quantity purchased, to non-RTRS soybeans. Such an opportunity
raises the inherent difficulties of traceability and verification to new
levels.
How Will
Certification Save Wild Habitats?
A key stated goal
of WWF is to halt deforestation through the use of maps identifying priority
habitat areas that are off-limits to RTRS members. There are crucial questions
over these maps, however. First, even though soybeans are already being traded,
the maps have yet to be drawn up. Secondly, the maps are to be drawn up by RTRS
members themselves. Thirdly, RTRS maps can be periodically redrawn. Fourthly,
RTRS members need not certify all of their production acreage. This means they
can certify part of their acreage as “Responsible,” but still sell (as “Irresponsible”?)
soybeans from formerly virgin habitat. This means WWF’s target for year 2020 of
25% coverage globally and 75% in WWF’s “priority areas” would still allow 25%
of the Brazilian soybean harvest to come from newly deforested land. And of
course, the scheme cannot prevent non-members, or even non-certified
subsidiaries, from specializing in deforestation.
These are
certification schemes, therefore, with low standards, no methods of
enforcement, and enormous loopholes. Pete Riley of UK GM Freeze dubs their
instigator the “World Wide Fund for naïveté” and believes “the chances of
Responsible soy saving the Cerrado are zero.” Claire Robinson of Earth Open
Source agrees: “The RTRS standard will not protect the forests and other
sensitive ecosystems. Additionally, it greenwashes soy that’s genetically
modified to survive being sprayed with quantities of herbicide that endanger
human health and the environment.” There is even a website (www.toxicsoy.org)
dedicated to exposing the greenwashing of GMO soy. Many other groups apparently
share that view. More than 250 large and small sustainable farming, social
justice, and rainforest preservation groups from all over the world signed a “Letter
of Critical Opposition to the RTRS” in 2009. Signatories included the Global
Forest Coalition, Friends of the Earth, Food First, the British Soil
Association and the World Development Movement.
Other commodity
certifications involving WWF have also received strong criticism. The Mangrove
Action Project in 2008 published a “Public Declaration Against the Process of
Certification of Industrial Shrimp Aquaculture” while the World Rainforest
Movement issued “Declaration against the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
(RSPO),” signed by 256 organizations in October 2008.
What Really Drives
Commodity Certification?
Commodity
certification is in many ways a strange departure for conservation nonprofits.
In the first place the big conservation nonprofits are more normally active in
acquiring and researching wild habitats. Secondly, these are membership
organizations, yet it is hard to envisage these schemes energizing the
membership. How many members of the Nature Conservancy will be pleased to find
that their organization has been working with Monsanto to promote GM crops as “Responsible”?
Indeed, one can argue that these programs are being actively concealed from
their members, donors, and the public. From their advertising, their websites,
and their educational materials, one would presume that poachers, population
growth and ignorance are the chief threats to wildlife in developing countries.
It is not true, however, and as WWF’s Jason Clay and the very existence of
these certification schemes make clear, senior management knows it well.
In public, the
conservation nonprofits justify market transformation as cooperative; they wish
to work with others, not against them. However, they have chosen to work
preferentially with powerful and wealthy corporations. Why not cooperate
instead with small farmers’ movements, indigenous groups, and already
successful standards, such as fair-trade, organic and non-GMO? These are causes
that could use the help of big international organizations. Why not, with WWF
help, embed into organic standards a rainforest conservation element? Why not
cooperate with your membership to create engaged consumer power against habitat
destruction, monoculture, and industrial farming? Instead, the new “Responsible”
and “Sustainable” standards threaten organic, fair-trade, and local food
systems—which are some of the environmental movement’s biggest successes.
One clue to the
enthusiasm for “market transformation” may be that financial rewards are
available. According to Nina Holland of Corporate Europe Observatory,
certification is “now a core business” for WWF. Indeed, WWF and the Dutch
nonprofit Solidaridad are currently receiving millions of euros from the
Dutch government (under its Sustainable Trade Action Plan) to support these
schemes. According to the plan, 67 million euros have already been committed,
and similar amounts are promised.
The Threat From the
Food Movement
Commodity-certification
schemes like RTRS can be seen as an inability of global conservation leadership
to work constructively with the ordinary people who live in and around wild
areas of the globe; or they can be seen as a disregard for fair-trade and organic
labels; or as a lost opportunity to inform and energize members and potential
members as to the true causes of habitat destruction; or even as a cynical
moneymaking scheme. These are all plausible explanations of the enthusiasm for
certification schemes and probably each plays a part. None, however, explains
why conservation nonprofits would sign up to schemes whose standards and
credibility are so low. Especially when, as never before, agribusiness is under
pressure to change its destructive social and environmental practices.
The context of
these schemes is that we live at an historic moment. Positive alternatives to
industrial agriculture, such as fair trade, organic agriculture, agroecology,
and the System of Rice Intensification, have shown they can feed the planet,
without destroying it, even with a greater population. Consequently, there is
now a substantial international consensus of informed opinion that industrial
agriculture is a principal cause of the current environmental crisis and the chief
obstacle to hunger eradication.
This consensus is
one of several roots of the international food movement. As a powerful
synergism of sustainability, social-justice, sustainability, food-quality, and
environmental concerns, the food movement is a clear threat to the long-term
existence of the industrial food system. Incidentally, this is why big
multinationals have been buying up ethical brands.
Under these
circumstances, evading the blame for the environmental devastation of the
Amazon, Asia, and elsewhere, undermining organic and other genuine
certification schemes, and splitting the environmental movement must be a dream
come true for members of the industrial food system. A true cynic might surmise
that the food industry could hardly have engineered it better had they planned
it themselves.
Who Runs Big
Conservation?
To guard against
such possibilities, nonprofits are required to have boards of directors whose
primary legal function is to guard the mission of the organization and to
protect its good name. In practice, for conservation nonprofits this means
overseeing potential financial conflicts and preventing the organization from
lending its name to greenwashing.
So, who are the
individuals guarding the mission of global conservation nonprofits? U.S.-WWF
boasts (literally) that its new vice-chair was the last CEO of Coca-Cola, Inc.
(a member of Bonsucro) and that another board member is Charles O. Holliday
Jr., the current chairman of the board of Bank of America, who was formerly CEO
of DuPont (owner of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a major player in the GMO
industry). The current chair of the executive board at Conservation
International is Robert Walton, better known as chair of the board of WalMart
(which now sells “sustainably sourced” food and owns the supermarket chain
ASDA). The boards of WWF and Conservation International do have more than a
sprinkling of members with conservation-related careers. But they are heavily
outnumbered by business representatives. On the board of Conservation International,
for example, are GAP, Intel, Northrop Grumman, JP Morgan, Starbucks, and UPS,
among others.
The Nature
Conservancy’s board of directors has only two members (out of 22) who list an
active affiliation to a conservation organization in their board CV (Prof.
Gretchen Daly and Cristian Samper, head of the U.S. Museum of Natural History).
Only one other member even mentions among his qualifications an interest in the
subject of conservation. The remaining members are like Shona Brown, who is an
employee of Google and a board member of Pepsico, or Meg Whitman, the current
president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, or Muneer A. Satter, a managing director
of Goldman Sachs.
So, was market
transformation developed with the support of these boards or against their
wishes? The latter is hardly likely. The key question then becomes: Did these
boards in fact instigate market transformation? Did it come from the very top?
Never Ending
Leaving aside
whether conservation was ever their true intention, it seems highly unlikely
that WWF and its fellow conservation groups will leverage a positive
transformation of the food system by bestowing “Sustainable” and “Responsible”
standards on agribusiness. Instead, it appears much more likely that, by
undermining existing standards and offering worthless standards of their own,
habitat destruction and human misery will only increase.
Market
transformation, as envisaged by WWF, nevertheless might have worked. However,
WWF neglected to consider that successful certification schemes start from the
ground up. Organic and fair-trade began with a large base of committed farmers
determined to fashion a better food system. Producers willingly signed up to
high standards and clear requirements because they believed in them. Indeed,
many already were practicing high standards without certification. But when big
players in the food industry have tried to climb on board, game the system and
manipulate standards, problems have resulted, even with credible standards like
fair-trade and organic. At some point big players will probably undermine these
standards. They seem already to be well on the way, but if they succeed
their efforts will only have proved that certification standards can never be a
substitute for trust, commitment and individual integrity.
The only good news
in this story is that it contradicts fundamentally the defeatist arguments of
the WWF. Old-fashioned activist strategies, of shaming bad practice, boycotting
products, and encouraging alternatives, do work. The market opportunity
presently being exploited by WWF and company resulted from the success of these
strategies, not their failure. Multinational corporations, we should conclude,
really do fear activists, non-profits, informed consumers, and small producers
all working together.
Jonathan R. Latham,
PhD, is co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource
Project, which is the publisher of Independent Science News
(independentsciencenews.org). He has published scientific papers in disciplines
as diverse as plant ecology, virology, and genetics.
SOURCES:
Jonathan A. Foley et al. “Solutions for a Cultivated Planet” Nature, October
2012 (Nature.com); Jason Clay, Economics,
Behavior and Biodiversity Loss: Sustainability as a Pre-competitive Issue. March 25, 2011; Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, Scarcity and
degradation of land and water: growing threat to food security,
November 28, 2011; Food and Agriculture Organization, State of the World Land and Water
Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW), November 28, 2011;Mat
McDermott, More Dirty
Deforestation: 55% of Indonesia's Logging Illegal + Cargill’s Two Hidden Palm
Oil Plantations, May 6, 2010; EOS, Earth Open Source; RSPO, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil; RTRS, Round Table on Responsible Soy; RSB, Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels; Bonsucro; World Wide Fund for Nature, Save the Cerrado:
What's happening in the Cerrado?; Gary Langer, Behind the
Label, Many Skeptical of Bio-engineered Food, June 19, 2001; Round
Table on Responsible Soy, Why certifying
under the RTRS Standard?; Natural Resources Defense Council, Atrazine: Poisoning the Well,
May 2010; Capital-Journal Editorial Board, Time for action
on rural depopulation, July 28, 2011; United Nations, State of the
World's Indigenous Peoples Report, Chapter 7: Emerging Issues,
January 2010; A Brief History
of Rubber; Letter of
critical opposition to the Round Table on Responsible Soy, April
2009; Global Forest Coalition;
ManGrove Project, Public
Declaration Against the Process of Certification of Industrial Shrimp
Aquaculture, November 3, 2008; World Rainforest Movement, Declarations
against the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Defence of Human
Rights, Food Sovereignty, September 2008; SRI-Rice System of Rice Intensification; Sarah
Hills, Coca-Cola snaps
up first Bonsucro certified sugarcane, June 22, 2011; Walmart Unveils
Global Sustainable Agriculture Goals, October 14, 2010; Largest
Corporate Dairy, Biotech Firm and USDA Accused of Conspiring to Corrupt
Rulemaking and Pollute Organics, January 23, 2012; Dutch Ministry of
Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality Sustainable Food Public Summary
of Policy Document; Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson, How the Science
Media Failed the IAASTD, April 7, 2008; Indepent Science News.
