The organic movement ceded too much power to the big food multinationals, who are now trying to dilute core values to make organic fit their free-market business model.
That’s the claim made in a new BBC broadcast by a group of organic farmers.
The special edition of the BBC World Service Food Chain programme – called ‘Organic Inc.’ – set out to discover what effect the increasing involvement of multinational food businesses in organic is having on the sector.
The programme brought together three organic farmers to discuss the theme. Presenter Emily Thomas explained that the BBC had invited a number of large food corporations to take part in the discussion, but none had been available – although a senior executive for US multinational General Mills did provide comment later.
Ronald Van Marlen, is from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and has worked in the organic industry for over 30 years (he is director of Toppas, a Serbian producer of organic fruit). He says there has been a change in the definition of organic over the past 10-15 years. “As the organic market became a full-speed, full-blown part of the organic movement it very quickly started to become a very big influencer on the values of the movement.
“For me, organic agriculture is more about a social movement, that is basically striving for a better world. And these values have been very clearly defined – they are the principles of fairness, health, care and ecology. But if you look around at what’s going on now, with big companies dominating the discussion, organic in practice is often not reflecting these values. That’s because these companies have hardly any interest in our values.”
We embraced them…we were lazy
Van Marlen says that the organic movement must accept some responsibility for the current situation. “I partly blame the organic movement for not taking time to explain to these large companies what our principles are about. Instead, the movement just went ahead and embraced them. We were just simply not interested in them, and we were also lazy. We didn’t want to take an interest in these companies, because we knew that they were the dirty part of the movement. Now they are going to influence our laws, they’re going to make organic as easy as possible foe themselves using a narrow ecological definition…and then it basically becomes a substitution agriculture, where you just change the chemical can for a biopesticide can. And that’s not what we meant when we started the organic movement.”
“We didn’t want to take an interest in these companies, because we knew that they were the dirty part of the movement”
Dave Chapman, from Norwich, Vermont, in the US, has farmed organically for almost 40 years. He said that organic certification in the US (run by the federal government and the USDA) was “actually based on a very good law – the Organic Food Production”. But he said the way the law had been interpreted and enforced by the National Organic Program had “travelled very far from the original meaning of organic.
Examples of current failings, Chapman said, included certification of confinement livestock production, allowing non soil-based farming systems (such as hydroponics) to be called organic, and a problem with fraudulent imports.
Chapman says that “after years of trying” he came to conclusion that “we are not going to fix the federal government – though we will still keep trying”. Instead, he switched focus to providing an alternative – as he sees it, a more authentic version of organic – in the form of an add-on label, created by the Real Organic Project.
Lack of traceability
Adrienne Thadani, is an organic farmer based in Mumbai who sells her produce direct to restaurants and consumers. She says differing understanding of what organic means in India, has led to a confused situation that raises questions about the integrity of food sold as organic. “67% farmers farmers in India farm less than one acre. So an organic farmer will typically be part of a collective, and they’ll probably be part of a self–certifying system. From the collective, the produce will be sent to a collection centre, and then it will go to a second one, where five large companies will have their centres. In this situation all the profit is going to the five big companies – and the farmers get very little difference between and organically produced crop and conventionally produce crops in terms of the price they paid. And there is no way to trace back where that produce came from.”
Thomas asked the three farmers if the involvement of big food companies in organic had brought any benefits. Chapman acknowledged that there were large organic farms that were operated very responsibly, and that they should be celebrated. He added: “It’s not a given in my mind that big it’s bad, it’s just that when big is bad it’s very, very bad.”
“It’s not a given in my mind that big it’s bad, it’s just that when big is bad it’s very, very bad”
Van Marlen said that the involvement of big companies stopped the organic movement from being self-satisfied. In the early days, the companies had taught smaller organic operators about efficient logistics, communications and branding. But he added that “it would be completely naive to see the enormous power they now wield in organic as a positive”.
In a separate interview, included at the end of the programme, Emily Thomas put some of the points raised in the film to Carla Vernón, natural & organic operating unit president and corporate officer at General Mills.
‘Hybrid’ approach is getting results
She said: “One of the things we can do as a bigger company is provide some of the skills that we have been acquiring and developing for decades. For example Costco might be the type of store where a small specialist brand has difficulty getting a meeting, and general mills has those. The other thing that we are able to do is to provide technical expertise. We understand things like the regulatory landscape, packaging and shipping methods. And we bring the ability to operate on a scale that the small (organic) business owner is not able to.”
Vernón said that acquiring organic businesses had been “eye-opening” for General Mills. “Some of the methods that organic farmers use, some of the inspiring approaches, can be applied in conventional farming and our CEO has been very public about our ambition to convert a million acres into a kind of hybrid, regenerative approach. We can improve soil health, biodiversity, the water tables, and levels of carbon sequestration through our conventional brands like Cheerios.
“Because these existing brands account for so much acreage they can effect really significant change. We don’t see those two things in conflict. As organic is just 1% of total agriculture lands in the US today, if we wait for organic to scale up we simply won’t be able to implement these environmental outcomes fast enough.”