MARKETS HELP RESTORE WATERSHEDS
Collective Action for Water Stewardship to ensure Biodiversity–Food Systems Integration Nature’s Pride, European market leader in exotic fruits and vegetables, has built a collaborative approach to address water stress and biodiversity loss across its global operations. Starting in Peru’s Ica watershed in 2018, the company brought together actors along the value-chain, from European retailers to growers, through multi-stakeholder collaboration to manage water and biodiversity at landscape level. Water became the organizing principle, providing a concrete entry point that connects ecosystems, agriculture, and food security. Building on the Ica experience, partnerships in Peru, Chile, and Spain show how markets can help restore watersheds when linked to collective, landscape-level stewardship, complementing farm-level audits with broader collaboration on the water–biodiversity–food nexus and strengthening food system resilience.
The Biodiversity–Food Systems Challenge
Value-Driven Innovations
Europe’s fresh produce supply chains depend to a large extend on biodiversityrich regions under water stress, including key producers like Peru, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Morocco, and South Africa. The demand for fruits and vegetables in Europe has stimulated agricultural production in these countries, which in turn has put ecosystems and water cycles under pressure. The result is a negative feedback loop in which food production erodes the natural system it depends on.
Nature’s Pride was founded 25 years ago on the principle of caring for both people and nature. This value-based approach continues to shape its leadership today. Instead of relying solely on audits, the company has committed significant time, expertise and resources to understanding complex watershed-level challenges and to developing collective action responses to water stress. This valuesdriven foundation has been central in enabling Nature’s Pride to pursue long-term, collaborative solutions that go beyond compliance and address root causes of ecosystem and water risks.
Peru’s Ica watershed illustrates this dynamic. The region sustains a 1.7 billion euro export industry, yet ground water abstraction far exceeds sustainable levels. Aquifer depletion threatens both plants and animals adapted to originally arid conditions and the livelihoods of communities. While farm level water audits are a good first step to promote best practices they cannot on their own address the water challenges at landscape level. Nature’s Pride recognized that addressing these issues required new forms of collaboration among actors with different interests like local producers, communities, and European importers. The need for consensus-building and negotiated agreements was evident: valley communities benefit economically from exports, while isolated Andean communities controlling the water sources much less so. Nature’s Pride, together with other business partners and the Netherlands government, hired water experts Good Stuff International and started a long trajectory to build trust. Through sustained efforts The Collective Action for Water Stewardship in Ica brought together previously disconnected actors across the value chain. Peruvian and European participants started ecosystem restoration activities together to strengthen the water cycle in the region.
Soil moisture sampling in the Ica valley, Peru
KEY TERMS Collective Action: A coordinated set of engagements among interested parties playing complementary roles, which pools together knowledge, resources and/or expertise to jointly identify and implement solutions at various geographic scales, with the aim to address shared freshwater challenges.1
Water Stewardship: The use of water that is socially and culturally equitable, environmentally sustainable, and economically beneficial, achieved through a stakeholder-inclusive process that includes both site- and watershed-based actions.2
Learn more about collective action for water stewardship here.
Value Chain Integration: Connecting European buyers, importers, and local producers around shared responsibility for landscape outcomes. Landscape Resilience: Building adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems to maintain productivity while enhancing biodiversity and water security.
1. Various Organizations (2024). ‘Unpacking collective action in water stewardship: shared solutions for shared water challenges.’ 2. Definition by the Alliance for Water Stewardship.