Introduction - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 6

Part II Standards and Certification
The maturing of the organic movement in recent years has brought significant
pluralism to organic. Do government or other (e.g., IFOAM) regulations define
organic, or are these simply official guidelines? What does organic certification
mean, and what political and ethical principles does it embody? The three chapters
in this part offer different, but complementary, responses to these questions and on
the meaning of certification.
Chapter 3 : Using a longitudinal study of a sustainable shrimp project in
Indonesia, Maki Hatanaka examines how organic certification affects the principles,
practices, and goals of the project. Her findings indicate that the emphasis on
objectivity, calculability, and expert knowledge that characterize certification con-
strained both farmer and consumer participation in the governance of the sustainable
shrimp project. Building on the case study, Hatanaka argues that certification may
be producing alternative agrifood initiatives that are highly rationalized and embody
shallow forms of social justice and environmental sustainability.
Chapter 4 : Allison Loconto and Maarten Van der Kamp draw upon their separate
research in Tanzania and in the UK to explore how context influences the way in
which 'organic' is defined through its practices. Using the notion of performativity,
they examine the organic standard as a calculative device that defines how organic
tea is grown in Tanzania and how organic cereals are grown in the UK. They argue
that while organic certification renders these products 'singular' in the UK market,
the products embody 'multiple' production practices. They conclude that despite the
use of standards to create a singular organic market, the practice of organic farming
remains diverse. This tension between singularity and multiplicity is necessary for
organic markets to develop and be maintained.
Chapter 5 : Instead of being preoccupied with the mechanistic supply and demand
formulation of world food security issues, Bernhard Freyer, Jim Bingen, Milena
Klimek and Rebecca Paxton ask, what would happen if we started to focus on the
idea of ethical values in the agrofood system? Their main thesis is: strengthening
the discussion of the ethical values in the agrofood system should play a key role in
our assessments of world food supply and demand in the future. This paper offers
some preliminary reflections on selected ethical values raised by concerns with food
supply, food demand and food access. The paper does not offer calculations of food
and human nutrition, but instead discuss the critical relationships between ethical
values and their quantitative influence on food security. The authors argue that a
value-centered discussion is essential to explicating many of the issues related to
organic practices and the question of how “to feed the world.” More specifically,
they suggest that the ethics embodied in the IFOAM Principles offer a framework
for identifying how organic agrofood systems might contribute to a sustainable food
future. This has also consequences for standard and certification procedures.
Part III Markets and Consumers
For years, many academics have critically discussed how organic is advertised, and
how consumers react to diverse marketing strategies. The three chapters in this part