Participatory Approaches to Organic Certification – Experiences from Mexico.
E. Nelson
University of Guelph, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, 50 Stone Rd. E., Guelph, ON N1G 2W1.
The idea of providing consumers of organic products with some form of guarantee that what they are consuming is truly organic has been around since the early days of the organic movement. Until the 1990s, these guarantee systems tended to be self-regulatory, voluntary, and to rely on a process of peer review. However, as the organic sector has increased in scale, there has been a shift towards a third party model, in which standards and verification procedures are determined by independent agencies, certifications are carried out by professional inspectors and extension assistance is divorced from certification. While such a model offers a number of benefits, especially in terms of niche market access, it has been criticized for being inaccessible to small-scale, low income producers, and for its inability to capture some of the values commonly associated with the organic movement.
Currently, the most widely recognized alternative to third party certification is the participatory guarantee system (PGS) – a framework officially recognized by IFOAM that bears much in common with the early peer-review model. At a practical level, PGS seeks to make organic certification more accessible to small-scale producers, particularly those focused on local and regional markets. More broadly, it attempts to challenge some of the ideological assumptions that underlie third party certification – for example, the prioritization of export-oriented production, the notion that organic agriculture can be measured primarily in terms of prohibited and allowed inputs, and the idea that only formally trained experts can be trusted to make valid determinations of certification status.
Research on how PGS is being developed by a network of local organic markets in Mexico demonstrates that it offers a number of benefits for both producers and consumers. In particular, it allows producers lacking third party certification to legally market their goods as ‘organic’. At the same time however, there are a number of significant tensions inherent in the translation of the PGS perspective from theory into practice. The first is the delicate balance between maintaining space for grassroots decision-making and flexibility, while simultaneously creating the degree of standardization necessary to ease functioning and assure institutional recognition. This issue became particularly apparent during the drafting of a regulatory framework for the inclusion of PGS in Mexico’s organic legislation. A second challenge is the difficulty of trying to insert a system based primarily on trust into a market arena. Notably, consumers tended to exhibit relatively high levels of trust in local market producers regardless of certification status, whereas the producers themselves were sometimes less trusting of their colleagues. Finally, although progress has been made in recent years, there remains a gap between desired levels of active, broad-based participation in PGS, and the levels that have actually been achieved. This is especially so when it comes to engaging consumers in the PGS process.
Winnipeg, Manitoba February 21-23, 2012
Canadian Organic Science Conference and Science Cluster Strategic Meetings
137
Globalizing Organics: Trade Regulations and the Changing Meaning of Organic.
L. F. Clark
Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, SK.
Over the last decade, the rapidly increasing consumer demand for organic products in Canada and the U.S. has led to profound market growth in the organic food sector. In 2010, the size of North America’s market for organic food products surpassed Europe’s as the largest in the world. Today, retail sales of organic products are worth over $2 billion in Canada, and over $27 billion in the US, however, domestic production has struggled to keep up with demand. As a result, much of the certified organic food products consumed in Canada are sourced from abroad, particularly the United States. Organic products entering the global marketplace are now subject to the same global trade regulations as conventionally produced products. This paper assesses what the insertion of organics into the global trade regime has meant for the traditional social and environmental dimensions of organic agriculture, which includes sustainable labour practices and land stewardship.
This presentation looks at what happens when an alternate system of production is subject to the same rules and institutions as its conventional counterpart that it originally strived to replace. Though there are specific regulatory frameworks and quality standards for domestic organic production, organic food and agricultural products moving through the global trading system are subject to the same ‘product based’ regulations and food safety standards as conventionally produced goods. It examines organic food products in the context of the global trade agreements pertaining to food products and quality standards, namely the WTO’s Sanitary and PhytoSanitary Measures (SPS) and the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) agreements as well as the concept of Process and Production Methods (PPMs) embedded in the TBT Agreement. This presentation discusses how the WTO’s agreements have influenced the development of the organic industry and how these institutions are influencing what it means for a good to be organic. Substantive aspects traditionally associated with organic production such as farm size and crop rotation are exempt from consideration in the criteria for whether a food product is determined to be ‘certified’ organic, and this is fundamentally changing the dynamics of the organic sector.
The overall conclusion of the presentation is that the integration of organic foods into the global trading system has changed the meaning of organic. Ii has created a bifurcation of the sector, creating one segment that continues to focus on the substantive aspects of organic agriculture (process-oriented distinctions of organic) and the other, which focuses on capitalizing on the market expansion and the premium prices organic products garner (product-based production standards). It argues that with respect to retaining and reinforcing the substantive qualities of the traditional organic movement in ‘certified’ organic production, links must be further strengthened with social movements and networks of stakeholders committed to socially, economically and environmentally sustainable food production models.