Case Study
Pesticides: bridging the industry – NGO divide
CropLife International is a global trade association representing the plant science industry in relation to developments around pesticides, GMOs and sustainable agriculture.
Over the last few decades, the crop protection industry has dedicated an enormous amount of time and resource towards stewardship programmes; the purpose of which is to manage crop protection products safely through their lifecycle. Despite this investment, and the significant progress made, the industry still has a largely unfavourable reputation and experiences difficulty impacting on regulatory and legislative decision-making. A major reason for its reputation issue is the lack of engagement with stakeholders by the industry and its unwillingness to tackle many of the tough issues in a collaborative way.
To address these issues we established a stakeholder consultation process. The primary objective of this exercise was to begin normalising relations between NGOs and the crop protection industry, with a view to eventually identifying key performance indicators and agreeing actions necessary to deliver against these.
The first stage in the process was to conduct a comprehensive audit of stewardship activities, progress and measurements. This audit was used as the basis for an initial stewardship workshop involving representatives from 30 different stakeholders, including industry, NGOs, IGOs, and academia. This was followed by an extensive dialogue between the different stakeholders around the ideas and positions generated by the workshop.
Although agreeing a final road map between the numerous stakeholders concerned with crop protection will necessarily take time, real progress has been made in establishing more constructive relations between the various stakeholders and towards an agreement on measurement indicators and actions.
