By Robert Parkhurst and Rebecca Wright et.al
Decisions on a Weekend Morning
Imagine it’s the weekend, and you are planning to build a new planter bed for your fall vegetables. Before you go to the hardware store, you need a good breakfast. You get out your Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffee, grass-fed milk, and scramble up some cage-free eggs with organic greens from your local farmers market. After breakfast, you head off to the hardware store and notice there are many options for supplies. You decide to buy wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and head home to build those garden beds.
In this brief example of a weekend morning, you made choices to consume or use five different certified agricultural and forestry products. And you selected these products because each displayed marketing information signaling to you that they had social, environmental, or animal welfare attributes that appeal to you. While you are not familiar with the details of these labels (e.g., what farm or forestry practices are actually required by the certification, what outcomes are actually achieved, or if there is a 3rd party verification system in place, etc.) you assume smart, well-intentioned stakeholders, representing relevant interest groups (e.g., agricultural, forest, environment, animal welfare, etc.) collaborated to create a label that does right by people, the environment, and animals.
Previous and Current Analysis
Prior to this analysis, we’ve released two blog posts exploring (1) “why conservation practices matter” for the Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) redesign of the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities (PCSC) initiative and the federal budget and (2) how climate-smart conservation practices also address soil, water, air, plant, animal, and energy (SWAPA-E) resources concerns.
Click here to see more...