Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of governments and intergovernmental organisations. IFOAM's mission is 'leading, uniting
and assisting the organic movement in its
full diversity
' [emphasis added] (Woodward and
Vogtmann 2004, IFOAM 2005). The main aims of the organisation are to:
• provide authoritative information about organic agriculture, promote its worldwide
application and exchange knowledge;
• represent the organic movement at international policy making forums;
• make an agreed international guarantee of organic quality a reality;
• maintain the Organic Guarantee System, setting international organic standards and
certification procedures and auditing member certification organisations to these
standards; and
• build a common agenda for all stakeholders in the organic sector.
Explosive growth in organic agriculture occurred in the 1980s. The reasons for this are
numerous and many were outside the control of the movement. The intensification of agricul-
ture had become a national political issue, fuelled by public concerns such as the increasing
destruction of valued features of the farmed landscape, the intensification of livestock produc-
tion (e.g. battery hens) and food scares (e.g. bacterial contamination) which resulted in the
public first discovering how industrial food production and processing systems worked, many
of which they found shocking and repugnant. Organic food offered an alternative, resulting in
considerable increases in organic food consumption during food scares. Increasing wealth and
disposable income in some developed countries resulted in organic food becoming highly
'fashionable' among higher socioeconomic groups. This is highly ironic, as the purchasing and
consumption of organic food as a symbol of social status is an anathema to the philosophy and
principles of organic agriculture (Guthman 2000).
Organic agriculture goes global
Beyond the industrialised countries of western Europe and North America, a large growth in
organic agriculture was occurring during the 1980s in parts of Oceania, Central and South
America, Asia and Africa. Many of these regions had existing indigenous farming systems that
could be readily adapted to organic agriculture, the export earnings were valuable, labour was
available, and some places received support from, for example, their governments, aid agencies
and NGOs. Although there are many local and regional movements around the world that are
similar to (or compatible with) organic agriculture, it is the latter which has become the most
well known and widely adopted complementary farming system. The other systems show how
different societies develop their own approaches to low-external-input or non-chemical
farming depending on their world view and the natural, intellectual and economic resources
available to them. These indigenous systems themselves have enormous value in their own
right (Peroni and Hanazaki 2002) and, where appropriate, should be maintained and sup-
ported. However, where the choices for farmers are changing, becoming more market orien-
tated, for example, then a hybrid of local farming methods and organic agriculture may offer a
viable alternative. Some of the incentives and constraints for farmers adopting organic agricul-
ture in less developed countries are listed in Table 1.1.
The traditional farming systems of Central and South America have been well studied over
many years (Gliessman 1985) and the principles and practices observed in these systems have
been used to develop the concept and practice of 'agroecology', a scientific approach to low-
input farming (Vandermeer
et al.
1998). The emphasis on enabling biological and ecological
processes, using existing resources and trading locally in the local farming system is well suited
to organic agriculture. There has been a high level of adoption of organic agriculture in Central
and South America in terms of certified land area and number of farms, with Argentina having
