The Rise of the Organic Foods Movement as a Transnational Phenomenon - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 741

governments(Stinner2007).heInternationalSocietyofOrganicAgricultureResearch
(ISOFAR)wasfoundedin2003,withtheaimofpromotingandsupporting“research
in all areas of organic agriculture, as it is defined by the global consensus of organic
agriculturemovementsanddocumentedintheIFOAMBasicStandardsforOrganic
Production and Processing.”8hereisalsotheInternationalOrganicFoodQualityand
HealthResearchAssociation,foundedin2004,whichpromotesresearchintotheefects
of organic foods on human health.9 These networks of scientists have played a central
role in developing the transnational dimensions of the organic movement.
The “organic” frame was not the first frame applied to the development of an “alter-
native” approach to agriculture. The biodynamic agriculture movement inspired by
Rudolf Steiner had introduced a standard and a certification scheme (using the brand
“Demeter,”atertheGreekgoddessoftheharvest)alreadybythelate1920s(Vogt2007,
p. 22).Yet,accordingtoDemeterInternational,only145,000hectaresofagricultural
land are managed according to biodynamic principles, a miniscule area in comparison
withthe30 millionhectaresclaimedtobeunderorganicmanagement.10 Why, in spite
of its head start, has the biodynamic movement not been able to expand further? On
this, we may of course only speculate, but one possible answer is that “biodynamic,” in
comparison with “organic,” has an inferior frame-bridging capacity because of its firm
groundinginamysticalworldviewinluencedbyHinduism,homeopathy,andastrol-
ogy(Purdue2000).
We may ask the same question about the way in which previously dominant
approaches to “alternative agriculture” in developing countries have come to be eclipsed
by“organic.”hatquestionisaddressedbyPeterVandergeest(2009)inastudyofalter-
native agriculture in Thailand. An important part of his explanation is that organic
farming has had a superior ability to speak to multiple audiences and appeal to a diverse
setofactors.Inhailand,theearliestapproachesto“alternative”agriculture—suchas
“naturalfarming”and“integratedfarming”—wereexplicitlyframedasanticommer-
cialandantistate.heirdevelopmentthusdepended,largely,onthe(graduallywaning)
enthusiasm of NGO activists and the Western aid agencies that funded their projects.
Incontrast,“organic”haswonthesupportnotonlyofamyriadoflocalruraldevelop-
ment-orientedNGOsandcommunitygroups,butalsoofdomesticcommercialinter-
estsandthehaistate.Historicallymutuallysuspicioussocialgroupsandorganizations
have thus been able to collaborate and cooperate within the “organic” frame in ways
that would be almost unthinkable for many of the rival approaches to alternative agri-
culture. Other “alternative” models of food production such as “integrated farming” or
systemofriceintensiication(SRI),whichmaybehighlyrelevantinanAsiancontext,
have been eclipsed because they, unlike “organic,” do not have readily available equiva-
lents in other developed or developing regions. Not only are they therefore less familiar
to globally dominant food producers and consumers, they also have more limited trans-
national movement support.
hisdiscussionoforganicfoodsasamobilizingframehasimplicationsforhowwe
conceptualizetheorganicfoodsmovement.First,itsuggeststhatitisdiiculttocon-
ceive of the organic foods movement as a single movement. There are, strictly speaking,