9 December 2009

When I was doing research for my high school newspaper, I was startled to discover from a doctor that apparently, a number of the students in my school were malnourished. This was startling because I went to one of the most expensive schools in Hong Kong. We weren’t malnourished because we weren’t getting enough food to eat, but because we weren’t getting enough nutrients from the food we were eating. This was due to the fact that few students were not eating enough fruits and vegetables, and also because the fruits and vegetables we were eating weren’t fresh and were grown using man-made "fertilizers".

Hong Kong is mainly a city, and we import most, if not all, of our food. To ensure that plants don’t go rotten over the journey abroad, produce is picked before they’re ripe, so they could survive the long journey to our grocery stores. As a result, those fruits do not develop the same amount of nutrients they would have if they were left to ripen naturally. A combination of poor quality fruit and little fruit in our diets means it's easy to be deficient in important vitamins.

Now as a college student, I’ve begun cooking more, and I’ve realized how much eating – especially discerning and adventurous eating – is part of my identity. Cooking and eating the freshest, most local ingredients doesn’t just mean you’re being environmentally friendly, but it also gives you pleasure that’s quite unlike anything else. But as a student in a big city, it’s not always easy to eat completely fresh ingredients, so the next best step is to buy organic. Even so, there are many different organic standards.

ORGANIC STANDARDS VARY!
The most longstanding national organic standards are those for the United States, the European Union, Japan and Australia. It’s in the interests of global trading that standards are as similar as possible, but there are discrepancies between these standards. For example, EU and Japanese regulations have an exhaustive list of allowed inputs for both farming and processing. The US instead differentiates between farming inputs that are ‘allowed synthetics’ and ‘prohibited non-synthetics’, thus allowing the use of all non-synthetic inputs that are not specifically banned.

Still, national organic standards are similarly vague, requiring that organic farming rely on methods which are derived from the farm’s natural ecosystem without offering much by way of practical details.

More detailed standards can be found from standards created by NGOs such as the Soil Association in the UK, which has arguably the most sophisticated set of organic standards in the world. The Soil Association issues its own organic certification and offers many other services such as sponsoring organic food fairs and liaising between farmers and consumers who want to consume more organic products. In addition to being more extensive than national standards, local organizations can tailor their standards to suit the local ecosystems and quickly adapt to new developments. For example, it would not be a very sustainable to constantly till land which has thin top soil, a tactic commonly used on industrial organic farms to control weeds.

The problem with relying on private standards is that without some common standard, there is little information as to their reliability and quality.

Enter the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), the worldwide umbrella organization of organic associations. Like the Soil Association, it set its own organic standards. It also has an accreditation procedure for which local organizations become organic-certifying bodies.

IFOAM's basic standards (IBS) are the guidelines for organic agriculture, serving both as a set of requirements as well as a template for organizations looking to create their own standards. The IBS prescribes for a vast array of agricultural practices, from pest control, animal welfare to processing to eco-system preservation. All the standards are divided into the same four part structure: general principles, recommendations on what can practically be implemented, minimum requirements for the particular service area and in some cases, exceptions that can only be applied under specific circumstances.

These standards expressly prohibit many of the current practices of industrial agriculture such as docking the tails of livestock. It also specifies that all ruminants should have access to roughage i.e. all animals who have a rumen to digest grass should be fed grass. These standards also aim to make organic farming socially as well as environmentally conscious. A section entitled ‘social justice’ requires fair treatment of farm labour as part of the IFOAM norms. The IFOAM accreditation criteria detail how local organic certifiers can be eligible to issue the IFOAM Seal on organic products. These set out the requirements for the structure of a company from internal audits to requirements for a clear chain of command. They also lay out the procedure by which an organization is accredited.

While these standards are clear, extensive, and well structured, it remains to be seen how well IFOAM standards can solve current other problems like protection of small farmers who, for one reason of another, fail to become nationally certified, or how it can help ease the transition for farmers who would like to practice organic agriculture. As of now, the surest guarantee of quality is to buy directly from the farmers themselves, and failing that to keep in mind that organic standards are not all equal.

N.B. Next, we'll look at the dilemma of eating organic in Hong Kong, which imports much of its food.




COMMENT BELOW: Do you look for the organic label, or have you ever wondered what it means?

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