Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
For individual farmers or very small groups, certification costs are just not worth it,
since local consumers are usually not in the position to pay an overprice. On the
other hand, farmers who are not certified cannot advertise their products as
organic and therefore, production and market growth are limited. A working group
of NGOs, farmers and others from MAOCO are trying to find alternative ways of
certification for the local market, but the task has been hard since the fact that our
legislation was made to comply with EU requirements does not give too much
room for alternatives.
Creative thinking is needed to find ways to bridge the socially embedded world of partici-
patory guarantee systems with more formal regulatory mechanisms. There may be lessons to
learn from countries such as Brazil where 'participatory certification' is placed alongside third
party certification in the country's domestic organic legislation (Giovannucci 2005). Further
work in such areas is critical to identify and strengthen assurance systems that are appropriate
to the particular conditions, scope and scale of organic trade.
Conclusions
One could dream about how nice the world would be if there were no need for standards and
control, with everything built on trust. But we have to face reality. The history of the term 'sus-
tainability' shows the growing need to defend the organic movement (Geier 1997).
While reality indeed dictates the need for standards and control of organic agriculture,
especially as the scale and scope of organic trade increases, in order for organic regulation to
develop into a truly effective and harmonised system, global in scope yet sensitive to local con-
ditions of production, trust needs to return to organic guarantee systems. Organic regulators
need to learn to trust each other across national, regional and even public-private boundaries.
In order to simplify organic standards and conformity assessment processes and ensure that
organic agriculture is accessible to all, organic regulators and consumers need to learn to trust
farmers just a little in working out the fine details of organic agriculture.
Activities and mechanisms that enable trust building are key, including the work of the
International Task Force on Harmonisation in bringing the various regulatory agencies
together to learn more about each others' systems and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses and
competencies of the various programs and models. Upon this basis, the slow process of har-
monisation can begin.
With respect to the need to balance the local and the global in organic agriculture, estab-
lishing the principle of subsidiarity will be most useful. This will ensure that the key principles
of organic agriculture are clearly defined and consistently enforced, with the rest of us trusting
enough to leave the day-to-day practice of organic farming to farmers who are most knowl-
edgeable about their own local conditions.
Last but not least, work done to strengthen and improve acceptance of internal control
systems as a tool for smallholder group certification is urgently needed while the organic
movement explores what the formalised regulatory systems can learn from participatory guar-
antee systems and how they can mutually reinforce each other to create a diverse yet comple-
mentary web of regulatory structures up to the task of providing assurance across an even
more diverse sector.
References
Agro Eco 2003.
Smallholder
Group
Certification:
Compilation
of
Results
. International
Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, Tholey-Theley, Germany.
