Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 15.1 IFOAM draft principles of
organic agriculture, May 2005
Principle of health
Organic agriculture should sustain and enhance the health of soil, plant, animal and
human as one and indivisible.
Principle of ecology
Organic agriculture should be based on living ecological systems and cycles, work with
them, emulate them and help sustain them.
Principle of fairness
Organic agriculture should build on relationships that ensure fairness with regard to the
common environment and life opportunities.
Principle of care
Organic agriculture should be managed in a precautionary and responsible manner to
protect the health and well-being of current and future generations and the
environment.
four principles on health, ecology, fairness and care (POA Task Force 2005) (Box 15.1). From
the perspective of research, the formulation of basic ethical principles of organic agriculture
have been advocated as a necessary tool for researchers to initiate far-seeing, proactive research
that can assist the development of organic agriculture, and the sustainable development of
agriculture in general, in a constructive and critical way (Alrøe and Kristensen 2004). The
present IFOAM process will hopefully provide a simpler and more consistent source of organic
principles for researchers to use as a starting point when planning and performing research on
organic agriculture.
Quality criteria for organic research
In the same way that proponents of conventional agriculture have criticised organic farming
so too have 'conventional' researchers criticised organic research. In the foreword to Tinker
(2000), it is suggested that 'the majority of literature on the subject [of organic farming] was
written from a strongly committed point of view'.
This kind of critique can lead the organic research community to reflect on the quality of past
organic research, and whether organic research can be of high quality. The answers to these ques-
tions depend entirely criteria of quality that are used. Some of the critiques of organic research
are based on the presumption that science should be free of values and ideologies, an idea that
Thompson (1995) has termed 'ethical reductionism'. The argument is that organic agriculture is
inherently ideological, science should operate without reference to ideologies and, therefore,
research that operates from the viewpoint of organic ideology and values is not scientific.
But science is neither value free nor independent. Values do and should enter into important
phases of the research process such as problem identification, design of methods and experi-
ments, model assumptions and the use of normative concepts (Alrøe and Kristensen 2002).
Some concepts that are widely used in agricultural research are clearly value laden. Obvious
examples include sustainability, food quality, soil quality, nature quality, animal welfare, rural
development and human wellbeing. Such concepts often have different meanings in different
groups, discourses and research disciplines. These conceptual differences inf luence the kinds of
