Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
management and cost benefit analysis where a proposed activity has to be proven to be harmful
to prevent its use. The precautionary and care principles require activities that have the poten-
tial to be harmful to prove they are safe before they are permitted. The principle of care ensures
that organic agriculture does not use new technologies that are likely to be harmful without a
thorough understanding of them and measures to prevent potential harm. This approach is a
pivotal reason for the organic movement banning the use of genetically modified organisms
because it views the technology as having a high potential for producing unanticipated negative
effects and that the cost of such effects will be paid for by people other than those benefiting
from the technology. However, while organic standards do not currently permit the use of
genetically modified organisms (GMOs), IFOAM World Board member Liz Clay (2003) has
written about 'facing up to GMOs'. This indicates that evaluating new technologies according
to the organic movement is problematic and will be subject to debate. In comparison, organic
agriculture has eagerly adopted a range of new technologies, such as ensilaging grass and novel
machinery, as their potential to cause unpredictable negative impacts is low, their use can be
stopped and it is the user who is most likely to suffer if there are problems. The principle of
care also extends to future generations and the environment as a whole, the considerations of
which are often excluded from risk management and cost benefit analyses.
The principles in context
At its base, organic agriculture is a holistic/whole system approach to land management and
agricultural production. This is demonstrated by the approach to pest control whereby it is the
design and interaction of the farm as a whole that controls pests, compared to industrial agri-
culture where pests are viewed in isolation and are controlled with pesticides. This holism
dates back to the beginning of organic agriculture in that the farm was viewed not as a collec-
tion of separate parts but a single, self-managing organism. This view of the farm as an
organism is the origin of the term 'organic' and is based on similar logic as James Lovelock's
(1979) theory of the planet as a single organism. For the earlier developers of organic agricul-
ture, the common exchange of resources (labour, inputs and produce) between farms at the
village or district scale would also have seemed natural. Now, inputs may be sourced from one
country, applied in a second country by a farm worker from a third country, to produce food
for a fourth country.
Organic agriculture also views humans as clearly being part of nature, not separate nor
dominating or controlling it. It is from this perspective that the need for humans to work with,
not against, ecological and other natural processes comes. Examples include ensuring closed
nutrient cycles, using renewable energy and not producing pollutants. However, organic agri-
culture is embedded in the wider society, and it can only achieve such aims if the rest of society
also achieves them. For example, it is difficult to work within closed nutrient cycles when the
community that consumes organic produce has no effective means of returning the nutrients
in the food back to the farm.
Although taking a holistic approach and wanting to work with natural systems, organic
agriculture views current levels of scientific understanding/knowledge of such systems as
incomplete. It takes the ecological view that such systems are phenomenally complex and at
some levels, fundamentally unpredictable. This view of unpredictability is especially applica-
ble when humans interfere and change natural systems; the concern is that the negative unpre-
dicted effects are likely to be much greater than predicted benefits. This is an another
application of the precautionary principle in that negative effects resulting from changes to
ecological and other natural systems may take many decades, even centuries, to become
apparent, at which point it is impossible to correct them.
