World Wildlife Fund

Involvement in the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS)

In 2005 the WWF launched the so-called Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS), in November 2006. The WWF has come under heavy criticism for its role in this forum.

Ostensibly, the RTRS arose out of a recognition that the problems with soy cultivation in South America are many and serious. They include deforestation of the Amazon rainforest for the planting of soy monocultures, soil erosion and depletion, destruction of biodiversity, and rural depopulation and poverty. Most controversially, most of the soy grown in South America is genetically modified Roundup Ready soy, which brings all the risks associated with GM foods in general. Added to these risks are the problems caused by the aerial spraying of Roundup (glyphosate) and other herbicides, which cause health problems in rural people and their livestock and animals, and poison water supplies and soil.

The RTRS was set up as a forum in which

soy multinationals, farmers, representatives of European industry and development organizations confer.

The stated aim of the RTRS was to help the industry move towards more sustainable practice.

In 2007, the Dutch NGO Solidaridad was invited to be a member and took a seat on the board. Solidaridad says:

The ultimate aim [of RTRS] is to increase the proportion of verifiably responsible soy on the market (it is now one percent). In 2007, a special committee was appointed by the Round Table to determine the international criteria for responsible soy.

The idea of the project is that soy approved by the RTRS would carry a label reassuring consumers that the product was sustainably and ethically produced.

However, critics have pointed out that it is not possible for the RTRS to achieve this when it is heavily corporate-funded and corporate-friendly. What is more, the RTRS will actively militate against sustainability by giving its rubber-stamp of approval to destructive soy production. ASEED, an NGO and critic of the RTRS, says:

organisations and movements from across Latin America have criticised the very existence of the Round Table saying it merely seeks to legitimise the irresponsible and unsustainable practice of industrial soy production and justify even greater expansion, regardless of the human and environmental costs.

In addition, the RTRS's sustainability criteria do not even mention GM soy, even though most of the soy grown in South America is GM and the massive expansion of GM soy planting in the region has directly caused many of the problems claimed to be addressed by the RTRS. FETRAF, a Brazilian family farmers‘ organisation, pulled out of the RTRS because it was not sufficiently addressing its concerns, including the production of GM soy.

During the first RTRS event in March 2005, civil society organizations held a counter-conference in Foz de Iguazu, Brazil to discuss the problems caused by soy production. They concluded that “sustainability and monoculture are fundamentally irreconcilable, as are the interests of peasant societies and agribusiness.”

Corporate members of the RTRS

The statement is filled with justification of an existing WWF project, the RTRS - the Round Table on Responsible Soy, but this project is also deeply flawed and dangerous - see below.

WWF also needs to go further than the precautionary approach on GM that it asserts in its statement. Promoters of GMOs in Europe could and do say exactly the same about supporting case by case assessments and a strong regulatory framework. A leading environmental organization should be asking for far more than this which will only lead to the release of GMOs in the open environment.

WWF needs to take account of the growing evidence of health effects and environmental damage, and the lack of long term testing on both.* WWF needs to work for "presumed rejection" of GMOs, rather than "case by case assessment".

With regard to the RTRS, WWF's logic is that the Round Table on Responsible Soy is about assuring the sustainable production of soy whether it is GM or non-GM. This is total sophistry. GM soy is overwhelmingly what is being grown in those South American countries where soy is proving destructive both socially and environmentally. GM soy is fundamentally NOT sustainable.

The history is that the WWF started the RTRS with what were doubtless good intentions but in order to get the big guns - ADM, Bunge, Cargill, etc. - to participate, they had to greatly weaken the exercise. That included dodging the whole issue of GMOs, and also weakening the requirements around deforestation. As it stands now, the RTRS "criteria" totally ignore the critical issue of GMOs - and they allow deforestation of the Amazon as long as it is in an area that is "zoned" for agricultural use.

What that means is that big farmers will continue to bribe local government to "zone" areas of the Amazon as open for clearing for agriculture. And so clearing of the rainforest will simply continue, but now painted green with a big "RTRS Approved" seal.

the 3rd Round Table on Responsible Soy last May. It was caught on camera and the resulting video (in 2 parts) is worth watching in full for a sense of how utterly non-transparent and non-inclusive of the people most directly affected by GM soy, the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) is. http://www.grain.org/videos/?id=174

The RTRS has 32 members from industry, banks and supermarkets, including the major crushers ADM, Bunge and Cargill, and 9 large-scale producers. Also part of the RTRS is WWF - the biggest and most instantly recognisable environmental group in the world.

The RTRS protest took place because GM soy monocultures are having a devastating impact on the environment, on small farmers and on indigenous people, in Latin America. At the same time there is strong consumer opposition to GM soy, particularly in Europe.

All of this is a PR nightmare for the big players who want to hide their culpability for the real impact of GM soy, and to obscure the whole GM issue by turning up the volume on issues around climate change and so-called sustainability. They hope that people will lose sight of the GM issue behind the green smokescreen of "sustainable [GM] soy".

But there can be no sustainability with GM crops. GM soy expansion is a threat to biodiversity in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. GM soy is much more environmentally damaging than other crops because of its unsustainable production requirements.

As the Argentinian agronomist Walter Pengue and the Berkeley agro-ecologist Miguel Altieri have noted: "The production of herbicide-resistant soybean leads to environmental problems such as deforestation, soil degradation, pesticide and genetic contamination. Socio-economic consequences include severe concentration of land and income, the expulsion of rural populations to the Amazonian frontier and to urban areas, compounding the concentration of the poor in cities. Soybean expansion also diverts government funds otherwise usable in education, health, and alternative, far more sustainable agroecological methods." (GM Soybean: Latin America's New Coloniser) http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=421

These problems are intrinsic to GM soy production, as a just published article on "Twelve years of GM soya in Argentina - a disaster for people and the environment" also makes clear http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=578

As some of you have pointed out, WWF could just as well start discussing sustainable nuclear powerplants, deforestation, human trafficking or childlabour, BECAUSE THEY HAVE BECOME A MAJOR MARKET REALITY (one of the arguments given for holding the GM soy debate)?

If WWF are seen to endorse "sustainable" GM soy, that will undermine both European opposition to GMOs and the growing concerns over the social and environmental devastation caused by GM soy.

Sadly, this is far from the first time WWF has opted to keep bad company. CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair accuses WWF of backing nearly every trade bill to come down the pike, from NAFTA to GATT and of sidling up to some very unsavoury government agencies advancing the same neo-liberal agenda across the Third World. Likewise, Brian Tokar has observed how (in 1997) WWF were associated with 19 corporations cited in the National Wildlife Federation's survey of the 500 worst industrial polluters. These companies included such recognized environmental offenders as Union Carbide, Exxon, Monsanto, Weyerhaeuser, Du Pont, and Waste Management. http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair02032007.html http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker07.html#49

For massive grain conglomerates like ADM, who have never done anything whatsoever for sustainability and do not have the best relationship with growers, it makes perfect sense to partner with WWF and other willing NGOs, or to set up their own greenwashing groups with pseudo-NGOs http://www.adm.com/en-US/news/_layouts/PressReleaseDetail.aspx?ID=39 http://www.aliancadaterra.org.br/

In their response to your letters of protest re the GM Soy Debate, WWF talk about the "successful completion of the RTRS process." The fact is that unless it gets strengthened to (1) totally reject GM soy and (2) have real teeth in its protection of the rainforest, the land, indigenous people and small farmers, it will be a success only for the ADMs and Monsantos of this world.