Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 14.3 Mango certification in Burkina Faso
(from SASA 2003)
A small producers cooperative in Burkina Faso faces many challenges in achieving Fair
Trade and organic certification, accessing socially and ecologically just markets and
getting its produce (mangoes) to markets in Europe. The cooperative is spread out over
many villages with each farmer working on small parcels of land (about 0.5-2 ha), with
mango sales being just one part of their livelihood, though the degree of reliance on
mango sales varies from one village to the next. Challenges include: farmer illiteracy
exacerbating the need for good documentation, lack of resources for extension and
inadequate regional knowledge on certification and group organisation to draw from,
timing the fruit pick-ups to coincide with optimal ripeness (ripe, but not over-ripe),
refrigeration for transport, and transportation to the port via a third country. These
factors are among those demanding attention. In addition, the group seeks both fair
trade and organic certification. Each system requires documentation and annual audits/
inspections to verify compliance.
In order to streamline the certification needs, local certifiers (FLO and Eco-Cert) are
examining each other's systems to highlight overlaps and where the other certification
has higher demands (e.g. FLO has stronger social criteria - the organic certifier can
accept FLO's assessment as adequate to meet organic social criteria; and the organic
certification has stronger environmental criteria, which are accepted as sufficient for
FLO's environmental criteria). By coordinating in this way (including the development of
a joint audit template) the inspectors will decrease the time, resource and reporting
requirements demanded of the cooperative, while at the same time ensuring the
integrity of each system. These kinds of synergistic relationships are being experimented
with in order to lessen the burden on small producers and to make more efficient audits
possible.
synergistic relationships. However, while representing the organic sector, IFOAM is not the
only participant: certification bodies, researchers, producers, consumers and other stakehold-
ers are also challenged to collaborate and make links between ecological justice (which the
organic sector does well and has experience in) and social justice.
Learning and social responsibility
There is neither a single outlook as to what social responsibility entails nor a clear pathway
marking how it can be achieved in the organic sector. As such, there are different ways to
respond to the challenge. One response, a regulatory approach, (see
A
framework
for
approach-
ing
social
responsibility
in
organic
agriculture
) would be to look for the core meaning and com-
ponents of social responsibility in organic agriculture that are agreed upon (by some) and
prescribed (to others) on a global scale. Discussion then would focus on questions to decide
who should determine this core, how an agreed upon core can then be best transferred/com-
municated so that it is taken up by others and how compliance to standards and guidelines for
practice derived from this core can be monitored throughout the entire supply chain. Through
negotiation and consensus seeking, experts and (other) stakeholders can arrive at mutually
suitable methods and processes for operationalisating social responsibility that can be imple-
mented and enforced on a global scale. Indeed, this has been the approach in developing
IFOAM Basic Standards (including chapter 8 on social justice), as well as the broadly recog-
