Many of the UK’s organic farmers are asking the government to relax the strict organic standards that govern their meat and vegetable production regimes.
The plea, from organisations including the Soil Association, is the result of a sales drop and fears for the future of 5,000 organic farmers across Britain. Organic food sales fell by 10% in the three months to the end of November 2008 – at a time when overall food sales rose by 6%
As a result, farmers’ groups have asked for approval to relax the ‘organic’ rules so that they can use conventional animal feed which is half the price of instead of organic food concentrate. The holiday wouldn’t be total – farmers would have to stick to the agreed low stocking densities, minimum use of antibiotics, and no use of fertilisers.
Part of the reason for the holiday is that around 400 farmers are preparing to enter the organic market in 2009/10 – they have already converted their land to organic production and will be selling organic produce for the first time – but if there isn’t a market for them to sell to, their businesses will collapse. The holiday is intended to tide them over for a year or so, until the market recovers.
A little bit pregnant or a little bit organic
But isn’t an organic holiday the same as being ‘a little bit pregnant’ – either you are, or you aren’t? The Organic Research Centre, thinks so. It says an organic standards holiday will confuse shoppers and that will cause them to stop buying organic because they won’t trust that ‘organic’ means what it says.
And that’s not all. There are two really good reasons why organic farmers shouldn’t be taking holidays at the public expense – the first is that the repercussions of the melamine/dioxins scandals have not fully percolated through to the market. It’s quite likely that many people will opt to buy organic as soon as the Christmas/New Year expenditure has cleared through their accounts, just because they don’t want their babies drinking contaminated milk or their Sunday lunch to turn out to be contaminated meat. Moving away from organic standards now would be an insane way to respond to market fears.
Who needs a holiday?
The second reason is less obvious, but much more important, environmentally. Organic farmers are supposed to produce their own feed, on their own land. One tenet of organic behaviour is to aim for self-sufficiency so that inputs and outputs can be guaranteed organic – so those who are buying in feed clearly aren’t fully committed to organic standards anyway. And those who have embraced the idea fully shouldn’t be penalised by a dilution of their high standards that can only confuse the public and damage the reputation of organic food as a whole. It’s not just about food standards, it’s about farming in harmony with capacity, and this holiday could turn out to be the holiday from hell for the farmers, the public and the UK environment.
Straw horse photograph author’s own
