"We think life on earth depends on how we farm," Dr Jason Clay of the world's largest environmental non-governmental organisation World Wildlife Fund (WWF) told delegates at the EurepGAP conference in Madrid, before asking EurepGAP to concentrate more on the end result it desires rather than the way to get there.
"We want producers to focus on how to think, not what to think," he said. "We are looking for better practices, not the best practice or good practices and we would encourage innovation, not compliance - a focus on results rather than processes or practices. There may be thousands of ways to get to one point, why limit it to just one?"
Clay said the WWF expects certification in any field "to result in lower environmental impact and provide a way to measure this from a baseline". Most environmental impact from farming, he added, comes from use of the wrong land in the wrong way.
He urged EurepGAP to help producers to find the right ways, but said: "Producers create 99 per cent of the better practices in use, but it is not their role - and there is not enough effort - to collect data and learn from the lessons."
"There is a need to cut the time it takes to develop better practices by half," he said in a direct reference to the seven-year-old EurepGAP programme. "This is a fast moving world." Clay said the attempt to harmonise standards across the world, however, "would automatically favour those that already have higher standards."
Clay also called for more transparency and communication with growers. "Producers need to know what the costs are and what the returns [for their investment] will be. They may not believe that, but it's a starting point and there is a need to use the carrot approach rather than the stick," he said.
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