Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
They are enthusiastic about the possibility of including ecosystem
management standards, and are thrilled the partnership is willing to
tackle this, just as they are the soil fumigation issue. According to Lynch,
this partnership spawned greater awareness of the possibility of working
with agriculture on the part of the WWF. Now agriculture is a much
more of a focus in the organization.
As part of her work with WWF, Lynch recently convened a partnership
in Florida with cattle ranchers, who rear calves in the winter and then
send them west to grow into adult cows. Much of the state of Florida
was a wetland, and a century of draining and agriculture production has
had terrible environmental impacts on Lake Okeechobee. Phosphorus
runoff has created toxic algal blooms across most of the lake, which
threatens the multi-billion-dollar Everglades restoration plan. The WWF
has assembled a partnership of private cattle ranchers, the Florida
Department of Agriculture, the US Department of Agriculture, the
National Resource Conservation Service, and the local water-manage-
ment district. The WWF has raised $2 million for a 3-year project to
develop, field test, and document a land and water stewardship partner-
ship, with an eye to scaling it up across the state. Lynch has worked for
several years to scope out the economics and build up the level of trust
to the point where partners can work together.
The WWF does not use its panda logo casually or often. Every
prospective use is subject to vigorous internal debate: what is the most
powerful way to use and protect it? Lending it to any product has risks,
and these need to be assessed against the potential environmental gain
achieved by informing consumer choice in the marketplace. The WWF
helped launch Protected Harvest to further this work, and to create a
strategy for conferring legitimacy on agroecological initiatives without
having to use the WWF's panda logo. Some within the organization see
the logo's association with an independent third party certification effort
as a very successful, programmatic use of the logo, while others are still
uneasy with this idea. The partnership with Wisconsin potatoes certified
by Protected Harvest was a 3-year pilot use of the logo that ended in
2006, and it is not currently being used elsewhere, although it may in the
future.
The Healthy Grown potatoes partnership is a remarkable working
model of agroecology. Growers, their organization, scientists, and an
