WWF'S insistence that it is merely "one voice among many" at an Australian roundtable for sustainable beef production would appear at odds with an internal document the hardline green group released in 2010, declaring the organisation's capacity to influence production standards.
Attention in Australia on the extremist policies of the global organisation, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, has been reignited this year after this newspaper revealed the depth of WWF's involvement in a newly formed group called the Roundtable for Sustainable Beef Australia (RSBA).
An offshoot of an international roundtable, which was formed in 2010 and is now attempting to apply similar pressure in the US and Europe, the Australian group includes representatives from burger giant McDonald's Australia, processors JBS and Teys Cargill, and peak beef producer-funded body Cattle Council of Australia, who have all been in discussions with WWF operatives since the start of 2011.
The RSBA's chairman, Dr Guy Fitzhardinge, was also revealed in this newspaper last week as a 'governor' of WWF, with a direct delegation to promote the extremist group's ideologies and actively influence key decision makers.
The RSBA had its first public outing a fortnight ago at Beef Australia in Rockhampton, where it used a seminar session to launch its "vision" for a "sustainable" beef supply chain.
The group's declarations that it only had the "best interests of producers at heart" was largely met with scepticism from the packed auditorium, based on WWF's previous track record during the years of Labor in power in Queensland, when it used its network of influence to sway government policy on issues like tree clearing and reef regulation in favour of hardline green agendas.
An internal document produced in the UK in 2010 and sighted by this newspaper reveals WWF's strategy around the formation of 'roundtables', and the key role the organisation plays in instigating their establishment and ongoing cultivation with the assistance of a willing coalition of supply chain partners.
The strategy has already taken hold in other Australian agricultural sectors.
For example, WWF currently partners with Coca-Cola and sugarcane growers in North Queensland in a venture called Project Catalyst, where the soft drink corporate colossus has sunk $1.7 million into reef-protection projects designed by WWF.
Other commodity categories have also been targeted such as seafood, with the formation of the Marine Stewardship Council and timber with the establishment of the Forestry Stewardship Council.
Coffee production has also been targeted through the Rainforest Alliance certification model branded exclusively through the McDonald's burger chain.
Beef has been the target of WWF globally since 2007 and in Australia for roughly the past 18 months after the first international beef roundtable was held in Denver, US, in late 2010.
The organisation refers to 'roundtables' as multi-stakeholder sustainability initiatives (MSIs).
Excerpts from the internal review document into the effectiveness of WWF's now flourishing roundtable initiatives reveal:
"MSIs can have important impacts with large corporations as drivers (e.g. Unilever, Coca Cola).
"Change can happen at a large scale when a critical mass of influential players in the marketplace makes the first move and pulls the rest of the market (i.e. producers, manufacturers, processors, retailers, investors, etc) towards improved environmental and social performance," the document's authors state.
"Through its engagement in MSIs, WWF aims to influence the largest companies on both the production and buying sides of any given commod- ity chain.
"The primary goal of MSIs is to establish sustainable production standards through consensus on the key impacts and performance targets of a given commodity."
At the meeting in Rockhampton on May 10, Dr Fitzhardinge was emphatic in denying that new standards would be imposed on producers to follow, instead referring to "production pathways".
"We are not an auditor and we are certainly not in the business of setting standards," he said.
"Producers need to be profitable and that is the starting point we are beginning from, to create a production system that is economically viable, environmentally sound and socially responsible.
"No one is proposing a blanket set of rules for something as vast as the Australian beef industry."
McDonald's representative Tracey Monaghan, the chain's quality assurance director, also moved to reassure producers that the company's primary objective was to sell more beef through its outlets.
"We are a meat company and we want to sell more beef," she said.
"But we all need to work together to ensure sustainability for the future.
"Our customers love their beef, but they also want to feel good about the food they are eating and comfortable with the way it has been produced."
Central Queensland beef produ- cer Ashley McKay said the position put forward by the RSBA sounded like another regulatory "cudgel" with which to beat Australian beef producers.
"A question that is really troubling a lot of us is that it appears this convention is starting with a blank sheet of paper, and a lot of us are saying 'Australia already has probably the highest ecological and environmental protection standards of most of the countries we're talking about in the world'," he said.
"Is this something we really need?"
l The document referred to in this article can be read in full at: http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/ wwf_certification_and_roundtables_ briefing.pdf
