Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
movement has been littered with research farms, test plots and applied research, it is only
in the past twenty years that a sustained effort has been put in place to develop peer-
reviewed scientific knowledge about organics. This represents in part a retreat by the
movement away from an insistence on 'wholistic' enquiry into organic farming, that made
investigations both complex and often outside the parameters of the existing journal
system. It also represents the determination of scholars allied with the movement to
provide the movement with not only the practical knowledge to farm organically but also
to argue for organic in policy circles. After nearly 80 years of work the organic movement
is increasingly able to prove its case, without presuming that decisions are always made
with regard to evidence.
The British organic movement is likely to remain straddling the reformist and progressive
tendencies within the food system, until the political opportunity structure within the food
system opens. If the history of the movement is a guide then this is not solely about the
dominant food system but also crises within the movement itself, the disintegration of the
late 1960s saw the emergence of organic standards; the decline in the early 1990s saw the
introduction of box schemes and the greatest headway was made in opposing the
introduction of GM crops. The British organic movement continues to display the potential
to be influential actor in reforming the food system (Reed 2010). The form and timing of its
next significant intervention is not apparent but its continued activity suggests that it
respond will to the next significant opportunity.
In the past decades the British organic movement has provided the global organic
movement and those movements allied to it with a number of examples that have created
opportunities. The most significant has been to pioneer the construction of a market based
on a certification scheme controlled by a social movement. This development created the
space and resources both physical and ideological for the wider movement to grow rapidly.
The forms of protest developed by British protestors against GM crops, which had in turn
been adapted from Australian tactics, were widely emulated as the dispute was diffused
globally. This suggests that whilst northern movements may play a particular role in the
global social movements that not all national movements are equally influential or
positioned to be so. Whether it is the legacy of the empire or that British English is a variety
of the
lingua franca
of the dominant global language, the UK's organic movement appears to
have historically enjoyed a particular place of influence. This suggests that innovations
within and by the British movement may have a wider importance for the global movement,
making it worthy of continued study and the investment of energy by activists looking to
make a change to the global food system.
10. References
Bello, W. (2009)
The Food Wars
Verso, London, ISBN, 13:978-1-1-884673315
Buck, Getz and J. Guthman (1997) From Farm To Table: The Organic Vegetable Commodity
Chain Of Northern California. Sociologia Ruralis, 37, 1, ISSN 0038-0199, 3-19
Burch, D. and G. Lawrence (2009) Towards A Third Food Regime: Behind The
Transformation.
Agriculture and Human Values
, 26, 4, ISSN 1572-8366, 267-279
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