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WWF to Tell Australian Cattlemen How to be “Sustainable”

The Queensland Country Life today carried a story entitled “WWF sinks hooks deeper into beef industry” by Brad Cooper which makes it beyond doubt that WWF is to project manage beef sustainability courses at the behest of Mc Donalds and with the full co-operation of CCA and MLA.

WWF, through their influence with the Greens in Queensland have been responsible for Vegetation Management laws implemented without ‘just terms’ and with no carbon credit for avoided deforestation. Those were stolen by the government to meet its Kyoto commitments.

An early task force reviewing damage to the Great Barrier Reef wanted to say that the reef was in good shape. However they bowed to the protests of the WWF representative and highlighted the small areas that appeared slightly damaged. WWF have claimed ever since that farming and grazing are damaging the reef in spite of lack of research and knowledge that urban centres are actually causing more alleged pollution.

All green groups have been involved in Wild Rivers legislations and declarations and possible World Heritage listing claiming on the one hand that the areas are either pristine or retaining most of their natural values and on the other denigrating the cattlemen who have lived there for more than 100 years for degrading the landscape and it therefore needs protection.

This legislation has put those graziers in a time warp whose effects will not be felt immediately but over time as it becomes impossible to adopt the results of modern research they will start to bite. One of the great lies told is that declaration will protect the areas from mining and CSG exploitation.

The greatest harm of all has been to our reputation, our self esteem and sense of worth that comes from knowing that you are doing a worthwhile job-feeding the people of the world.

WWF and others have taken the flawed findings of ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow” and publicised them to the point where vegetarian celebrities, authors, journalists, governments and research organisations including our own National Health and Medical Research Council have urged limited or zero meat intake on environmental grounds.

The upshot is that our credentials have been damaged as part of a campaign by environmentalists to discredit those of us who live by the land in order to set themselves up as the environmental gods and the only people deserving of dictating policy and receiving funding and even big business has fallen for the scam.

Be aware that when you respond to that beautifully worded invitation to an Ausgraze workshop your presenter will be in the employ of WWF and the “voluntary” course will soon become mandatory.

Have CCA and MLA let us down once again by not highlighting the science that is on our side instead of responding to the dark green Mob.

The table below is found at page two of the document, Naked extortion? Environmental NGOs imposing [in]voluntary regulations on consumers and business found at the IPA web site. To read the entire document click on this link.

PRECEDING DISCUSSION - http://justgroundsonline.com/forum/topics/international-green-group...

UPDATE #1

Beef Central article, WWF: To engage or not to engage?

UPDATE #2

Follow up article by Brad Cooper published at farmonline, Sustainable beef plan under wraps

Tags: CCA, MLA, McDonalds, WWF, barrier, cattlemen, graziers, great, reef

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joanne Rea on April 5, 2012 at 7:27am

Dale

Congratulations on Letter of the Week.

This issue has certaily become a hot topic and Brad Cooper being able to expose that discussions have been going on for so long "under cover" is a coup for him and he needs to be given all credit. Great story Brad.

CCA obviously knew that trying to introduce WWF as a partner was going to meet with opposition.

Obviously we were to have had as little time as possible to object but if we are lambs to the slaughter for CCA and MLA then if we let WWF into our businesses we will be bleached bones on the ground.

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Permalink Reply by Joanne Rea on April 6, 2012 at 9:23am

Thank you for yor interest and assiatance JCF

As you can see from the scanned clippings the rural media has been pursuing this topic since it became public with both QCL and Beef Central covering the issues.

I am aware that many of the constraints which apply to corporate businesses do not apply to "charities" and "not for profit".

WWF does not care about stress or viability. They have shown this on dozens of occasions all over the world where they have "resettled" people, often in squalid conditions to turn ancestral lands into nature reserves.

The ENGO's are probably among the largest property owners in the world and in Australia they are acquiring large areas with government money.

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Permalink Reply by Rory Donnellan on April 10, 2012 at 10:15pm

The only involvement that WWF should have with beef is to find themselves dehorned, steered and branded, and then trucked to the meatworks for safe processing.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Moore on April 13, 2012 at 5:40pm

Yes and $750000 per year is not enough for this four person office apparently- they want some levy money too and get it up to 5-15 Million.

With a track record like this $75 would be too much for these clowns!

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Hutcho on April 13, 2012 at 7:16pm

Getting down to basics, who the hell invited WWF into the picture ? How does an NGO such as WWF get a toehold into, in this case the beef industry, but other industries as well ?

As Dale said above:

"Well hello, CCA & MLA are charged with the responsibility of looking after the interests of Australian beef producers; the buck does stop with them."

Rob Moore said:

Yes and $750000 per year is not enough for this four person office apparently- they want some levy money too and get it up to 5-15 Million.

With a track record like this $75 would be too much for these clowns!

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Permalink Reply by Joanne Rea on April 15, 2012 at 1:11pm

Jeff

The history of WWF and who invited them in goes back to November 2010 when Cattle Council, according to them, was invited by McDonalds, our biggest customer, to a conference convened by WWF in Denver, Colorado.http://sustainablelivestock.org/

This conference, known as the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, was attended by many representatives from the Australian beef industry and WWF Australia's Nick Heath.

The Australian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (ARSB) became a member of the Global Roundtable and seems to have the support of Cattle Council. The particular sensitivities of Queensland cattlemen, Australia's largest beef producing state, to WWF have not been acknowledged.

As outlined in Ashley McKay's letter, MLA have been involved in the development of the business plan but in the last Country Life article by Brad Cooper, they seemed to be distancing themselves from the program.

CCA's David Inall has said that we will have the chance to question all participants at the launch at Beef Expo including a McDonalds representative.

Jeff Hutcho said:

Getting down to basics, who the hell invited WWF into the picture ? How does an NGO such as WWF get a toehold into, in this case the beef industry, but other industries as well ?

As Dale said above:

"Well hello, CCA & MLA are charged with the responsibility of looking after the interests of Australian beef producers; the buck does stop with them."

Rob Moore said:

Yes and $750000 per year is not enough for this four person office apparently- they want some levy money too and get it up to 5-15 Million.

With a track record like this $75 would be too much for these clowns!

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Permalink Reply by Rob Moore on April 15, 2012 at 2:44pm

Joanne - found this old piece from Feb 2011- back before selective amnesia set in and it is quite revealing in the detail. Bill Bray- ex CCa boss running a group to benefit from all this green tape.

Smacks of another Victorian- John Wyld who was the father of the NLIS scheme who had a vested interest in tag reading hardware! Mentions a meeting in Melbourne with MLA and Nff discussing details.

CCA is not only stupid - they are being dishonest as well!!

Sydney Morning Herald (5 February 2011):

Food manufacturers, retailers and WWF are joining forces to address how to feed the world’s population, writes Paul Myers.

WHEN the World Wildlife Fund engages the ideologically distant interests of the cattle industry, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to discuss global food production, it’s clear something is cooking.

It is a subtle, yet vital, shift in the way food producers, manufacturers, retailers and groups outside the traditional food fence, such as WWF, are addressing a new paradigm in feeding the world’s rapidly increasing population: how food is produced, not just how much.

In practice the two issues are inseparable. The difference is that while feeding a projected 9 billion people by 2050 from less farmland has long concerned governments, and global aid and food bodies, doing so in a way that satisfies escalating environmental and animal welfare scrutiny, state and national regulations and changing consumer attitudes is considerably more complex.

Behind the farm gate it means that practices in the largest and most advanced agricultural nations, including Australia, will be in the spotlight as the new food production ground rules take shape.

Enter WWF as the unexpected and uninvited powerbroker in this high-stakes scenario. The world’s largest independent conservation organisation is targeting 100 key companies that globally trade commodities including beef, sugar, cotton, palm oil, soybeans and coffee to participate in ”round table” forums about how extra food can be produced with fewer, but more precise, inputs.

Key targets are farmlands with sensitive ecosystems, such as Great Barrier Reef catchments in north Queensland. Along the way, whole industries – including beef and sugar in Australia – are being swept up in the process.

WWF’s Australian program leader for water, Nick Heath, says three times more food and fibre will be needed in the next 40 years than is produced now. ”The answer lies in precision agriculture – more crop per drop.”

And Rob Cairns, the organisation’s Australian program manager for sustainable agriculture, who has a background in the cotton and sugar industries, assures the food chain that WWF is ”just one player” in the quest for a lower food environmental footprint, ”not the policeman”.

”It’s about sustaining food production without impacting on eco-systems,” he says. ”At the moment, it’s confusing for consumers. By default, organics have been seen as the answer. But organics can’t clothe and feed the world, so we have to work with those who can make a difference. And it has to involve a number of commodities.”

Beef is at the top of that list.

To the displeasure of some traditionalists, a meeting in Denver, Colorado, last November laid the foundations of what could be the most unlikely food alliance ever: cattlemen from Australia, North America and Argentina; the world’s largest beef purchaser, McDonald’s; the largest retailer, Wal-Mart; multinational food production and marketing group Cargill; the animal health conglomerate, Intervet/Schering-Plough, and WWF.

WWF called the get-together to discuss ”sustainable beef production”. In April it will participate with the National Farmers’ Federation, Meat & Livestock Australia and other groups in a sustainable food summit in Melbourne to canvass environmental and food security issues that could be part of the national food plan being developed by the federal government.

Attendees at the Denver meeting came away encouraged and keen to keep talking.

Neither the executive director of the federation’s Cattle Council, David Inall, nor the council’s president, Greg Brown, a north Queensland cattleman who was also in Denver, fear WWF has an agenda to limit beef production. ”They were looking for some comfort that beef producers have an understanding of environmental issues,” Inall says.

In this regard, the Australian cattle industry may be ahead of the game. Meat & Livestock Australia is developing a voluntary environmental module that will enable beef producers to demonstrate the ”environmental responsible nature” of their production systems.

But it remains unclear whether farmers’ ability to merely demonstrate environmental responsibility, rather than prove it, will be enough.

To this end, a group of cattle producers in Gippsland, Victoria, is marketing beef sourced from properties with independently audited environmental management systems that comply with the international ISO 14001 standard. Their ”enviromeat beef”, sourced from 15 suppliers, is thought to be the first labelled food product backed by an environmental management system in Australia.

One of three shareholders in the venture, a former Cattle Council president, Bill Bray, says cattle producers have to ”get on the front foot and show consumers we are a big part of the solution, not the problem”. ”Cattle producers manage 45 per cent of land in Australia. Farmers everywhere are trying to understand [the relationship between] their production systems and the environment.”

At the other end of the scale, McDonald’s – the world’s largest purchaser of Australian beef (64,300 tonnes in 2010, 60 per cent of which was exported) and largest consumer of Coca-Cola – is working with WWF internationally and locally in programs involving beef and sugar.

Rob Cairns says engaging ”big players” such as McDonald’s is the most effective way to achieve positive food production outcomes. Participating companies include Kraft, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Cargill, Dole (pineapples), Wal-Mart and others outside the food chain such as IBM, IKEA, Hewlett-Packard and Toyota.

Many in the beef industry speculate the WWF-McDonald’s partnership will soon result in an ”enviro burger” made from beef grown on properties with environmental accreditation. The restaurant chain’s head of sustainable supply chain and social accountability in Asia-Pacific, Brian Kramer, who was in Denver, says it is ”too early to talk such specifics”. But the Cattle Council’s Greg Brown believes the chain’s exclusive use of Rainforest Alliance coffee and its successful McAngus promotion featuring Angus beef point to the future direction.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is participating independently with WWF and Reef Catchments, a natural resource management group in the Mackay-Whitsunday region of north Queensland, in a project designed to improve water quality and reduce sediment from sugar-cane farms on the Great Barrier Reef. Now in its second phase, Project Catalyst involves 50 canegrowers who have committed to farming practices, including precision application of chemicals using satellite technology and monitoring water quality.

Coca-Cola South Pacific’s public affairs and communications manager, Michelle Allen, says the initial success of the project is so promising that it may be expanded to other sugar-growing countries.

Either way, the Queensland government’s 2009 Great Barrier Reef Protection Amendment Act 2009 has already changed farming practices. A key component of the legislation is a limit on chemicals that can be applied by farmers with more than 70 hectares of sugar cane in the Whitsunday wet tropics and by cattle producers with more than 2000 hectares in the Burdekin dry tropics.

The Premier, Anna Bligh, said that within four years of its introduction the act would cut by half the 32,000 tonnes of fertiliser nutrients previously flowing on to the reef each year from mainland water catchments.

So far, most of the environmental food action is on the ground. At the retail level in Australia, eco-labelling is virtually non-existent.

In Britain, Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s supermarkets sell Rainforest Alliance-branded bananas and coffee, which is also served on airlines and in McDonald’s McCafe and Gloria Jean’s Coffees outlets.

The British government’s Carbon Trust environmental watchdog has developed a label that is applied to 120 products in Tesco supermarkets. It gives advice about how to reduce the product’s carbon footprint when cooked, used or disposed, and appears on foods including vegetables, milk and orange juice. The program has now been extended to Australia through Planet Ark.

A labelling scheme that began in Japan in 2009 provides a detailed breakdown of the carbon footprint of numerous foods and drinks. In the United States, Wal-Mart, which sells more than 20 per cent of all US groceries, is developing an eco-labelling program that will give a green rating to all items sold in its 7500 stores worldwide.

Australian supermarket chains are wary about venturing down this path. A spokesman for Coles, Jim Cooper, says eco-labelling is an emerging trend but ”isn’t the number one issue for our customers”.

Many food experts believe that, eventually, on-farm environmental certification may be essential for food products to gain market access and shelf space in supermarkets.

If and when enviro food labelling reaches Australia, a ”how green is my trolley?” assessment of food purchases may be possible at the checkout. This may be several years away, but the way the food landscape is changing, don’t count it out

Source: www.smh.com.au

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Hutcho on April 15, 2012 at 6:26pm

Thanks Joanne, Rob, Dale ,

for your info on involvement of the WWF with the meat and livestock industry.

From reading the articles, I see a similarity to the situation described in Jennifer Marohasy's paper -

"WWF Says 'Jump!'Governments Ask 'How High?'

and the Institute of Public Affairs paper by Tim Wilson titled:

"Naked Extortion" - Environmental NGO's imposing [in]voluntary regulations on consumer and business.

as shown above.

I questioned this involvement with NGO's with the advent of McDonalds and their "Rainforest Alliance" certified coffe, and more recently of NGO certification of fish and fish products advertised in the Woolworth's flyer.

Food supply lines are being taken out of the free market and are being replaced with certified, controlled sources by NGO's under the banner of Sustainability, with the reasons given as the Evironment and Climate Change. - Read control.

WWF and the Australian Greens are using the Great Barrier Reef as a yardstick of “environmental” damage, that is being done by agriculture and livestock farm production. Nutrient and fertiliser run off along with pesticide and herbicide run off are used as their weapons.

Items overlooked or just plain ignored, as they may affect public perception of the GBR problems as projected by WWF and various Enviro groups, is nature's involvement in any reef damage. Recent years has seen cyclones such as Hamish and Yasi, which has devestated corals and sea grass beds (source Australian Institute of Marine Science).

Also the Crown Of Thorn Starfish (COTS) has damaged a fair percentage of the GBR, with recovery rates listed as from 5 – 50 years. (AIMS). Even though the majority of COTS attacks has abated, there are still pockets of infestation.

Recent revelations about butchering of turtles and dugongs on the top end of Cape York, also brought to notice the stress that cyclone Yasi placed on the area, by destroying sea grass beds, reducing feeding areas for these marine animals.

It would be good if it was as easy as “MLA and CCA should admit to a mistake and walk entirely from WWF. “

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Hutcho on April 15, 2012 at 11:01pm

Yes Beverley,

You brought up the topic about the illegal butchering of turtles, using rocks to kill the turtle etc.

It was additional information, which I didn't post against yours.

I followed it up and found an interview about the butchering of turtles and dugongs.

In that article, the subject of stresses placed on the animals due to loss of feeding areas caused by the damage from cyclone Yasi came up.

The cyclone had a damage radius of up to 500kms at sea, due to strong currents.

It also caused coral damage closer to the track of the cyclone.

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Hutcho on April 16, 2012 at 12:48am

Hi Beverley,

Just found one of the references to loss of seagrass due to cyclone Yasi, and the turtle story.

This one from Australian Geographic:-

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/turtle-and-dugong-fo...

In the paragraph about poaching being a minor problem.

There was another with an interview with a native hunter, but I cannot see it at present.

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Permalink Reply by Joanne Rea on April 16, 2012 at 9:41am

JCF

I'm not sure that I know what you mean by "getting on the front foot".

If you mean that we need to demonstrate our "sustainability" credentials, MLA have at least six pages of research titles with "sustainable" in them. There are also many independently run agricultural "sustainability" programmes in existence.

Queensland also has reef protection regulation which targets farmers.

It makes one wonder what the motives of WWF are. More regulation plus money and power can be the only answers.

We have lots of ammunition in the armory but I believe that we fall down in publicising the facts when extreme groups publicise extreme positions.

MLA have producers money but not the will.

Some such as CCA and McDonalds see "getting on the front foot" as the partnering with WWF. PRA has been trying to alert these organisations, through the media to the common tactics used by this organisation world wide.

PRA sees "getting on the front foot" as recognising that partnering with WWF will not be the end of our problems but the beginning of a set of problems which CCA seem to be unaware of.