Posted on December, 11 2009

Legal and efficient use of water and land are among the criteria being applied by some of Europe’s leading retailers in sourcing strawberry suppliers from around the beleaguered Doñana National Park in southern Spain, WWF warned today.

WWF is hoping that the pressure from retailers will help ease some of the problems of strawberry farm encroachment and interception of water supplies around the national park, while waiting on a long promised management plan from Andalusian authorities.

Doñana National Park is the flagship of Spain’s protected areas and it protects a key bird migration route between Europe and Africa.

Europe buys nearly half of the strawberry production of Doñana, which implies an income of 150 Million Euros for the sector. But in the past few decades, an expansion of strawberry growing, part of it illegal, restricted its vital water supplies.

The responsible buying principles being implemented by the collaborating supermarkets is rapidly being adopted by other European retailers, in order to comply with the future requirements of the certification of Global Good Agricultural Practices (GlobalGAP) that will start to be applied in 2011. Among them, the efficient use of water, which may change from simple recommendations to strict requirements to obtaining the certification.

Some supermarket chains, in collaboration with WWF and some responsible strawberry growers, began implementing stricter buying criteria up to three years ago. The introduction was gradual, to give farmers time to adapt. This coming season the requirements will be more strictly applied than ever before.

“If we want to maintain the access of the strawberry from Doñana to the increasingly demanding European market, Spain, and the Government of Andalusia in particular, shall activate the necessary control mechanisms”, said Juan Carlos del Olmo, CEO of WWF Spain.

With more then 1.000 illegal boreholes in the aquifer of Doñana, it is estimated that half of the strawberry surface is irrigated without the legal permits and one third is placed on formerly forested areas. The mismanagement of the water has reduced by 80% the amount of water that flows from the aquifer to the protected wetlands. But now its management in the Doñana area is coming under critical, external commercial scrutiny.

Doñana park is home to endangered wildlife including the spoonbill and the Iberian Lynx. Securing Doñana from the threat of being turned into eucalypt plantations and farming land in the 1960s played a key role in both the formation of WWF as the leading global conservation organisation, and the establishment of the first global environment treaty, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.