Feeding theWorld – The Contribution of IFOAM Principles - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 88

Table 5.3 The IFOAM Principles and food distribution/marketing
Impact on food distribution/marketing Specific quantitative impact

Health
Assure storage and distribution conditions that
protect the health and naturalness of products, e.g.
through short supply chains

Reduction of food losses

Strictly define the health standards and criteria of
products

Increase of the share of healthy food

Ecology
Foster the efficient resource use of packaging
attention to shorter supply chains

Reduction of food losses

Offer non-standardized products for a lower price
instead discarding them

Increase of food usability, less food
waste

Fairness
Develop fair relations all along the agro-food supply
chain

Increase of food avoiding stock market
initiated food losses

Make food more accessible to lower income
consumers

Reduce of not marketable high priced
food

Account for real environmental and social costs Increase of food sovereignty

Share “fair” costs and income distribution among all
participants, including fair partnership with
small-scale farmers and between farmers and
consumers
Care
Protect health and well-being of current and future
generations and the environment

Increase the efficient use of produced
food

Decentralize food supply Increase of food through less

transportation risk

Foster availability of regional and seasonal Increase of food through efficient use

of regional and seasonal available food

￿ IFOAM Standards for Organic Production and Processing

￿ IFOAM Accreditation Requirements for Bodies Certifying Organic Production

and Processing

The responsibility and mission of these documents are as follows (IFOAM 2012 ):
“The COROS articulates the broad objectives which the production rules in organic
Standards and regulations commonly seek to achieve, and presents the common detailed
requirements that relate to these various objectives. The COROS contains only requirements
that were commonly found in organic Standards and Regulations globally (ibid, 13); The
COROS is intended for use in international equivalence assessments of organic Standards
and Regulations.... it is proposed as a template to guide governments and other stakeholders
in conducting objective based equivalence assessments of two or more organic standards
or regulations. In the context of the IFOAM Organic Guarantee System, it serves as the
IFOAM Standards Requirements: the international reference against which all organic
standards and regulations will be assessed against, for the purpose of inclusion in the
IFOAM Family of Standards” (ibid, 14);
The IFOAM Standard (IS) is an internationally applicable organic standard developed