Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Society
Agricultural sector
Organic sector
Social
responsibility
Figure 14.1
Positioning social responsibility in the organic sector. The arrows indicate the
interconnectedness of the various contextual levels.
agriculture to pursue its own process, thereby contributing to a 'desirable' and socially respon-
sible modernisation of the global agrifood sector, and thus to the whole of society?
As part of setting its directions for research and development of the organic sector, the
Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming (DARCOF) identified three basic principles for
action: the cyclical principle, the precautionary principle and the nearness principle. The
nearness principle implied that social aspects of food production can be improved by nearness
between producer and consumer. Applied at the local level, as indeed had been taking place
when the organic industry was small and agriculture very uniform in a country like Denmark,
production, processing and marketing systems were proximate and transparent, and social
justice concerns were hardly expressed. If the nearness principle is extended to the wider
organic sector at national and global levels, it seems sensible to argue that emotional nearness
would substitute for physical or geographical nearness when it comes to social responsibility
concerns (DARCOF 2000).
Localisation as an alternative to the globalising process of agriculture and as a way of re-
establishing the proximity between producer and consumer has been attempted in organic
agriculture and through several other related initiatives, such as farmers markets and commu-
nity-supported agriculture. On the basis of studying 37 local agrifood initiatives in California,
which as a State has a long history of such initiatives, Allen
et
al
. (2003) concluded that social
justice may be difficult to construct at a 'local' scale. Despite the wide recognition of the issue
of social justice of labour as problematic in California, these researchers found that social
justice concerns of the agrifood initiatives they studied were more to do with food access and
support for small farmers than with justice for farm workers in terms of recognition, wage and
job security. Questions related to the position of seasonal workers in organic farms in Europe
have not been addressed through research either. Paucity of information on social problems in
organic farming and the lack of in-depth studies on working conditions for labour have been
