“What ‘organic food’ and its localised market was in those days bears little resemblance to ‘the industry’ that it is today: an industry that is heavily and centrally policed, has a compendium of regulations and is ‘big business’ on a global scale.”

He goes on to describe how, despite rapidly growing demand for organic food over the last two decades, the area of land certified organic in the UK has remained pretty much static at around 3 or 4 percent. Rose believes that this is because the UK retail sector is now dominated by the supermarkets who care little where or how produce is grown or raised so long as it can be sold:

“Their green credentials include the import of some eighty percent of organic foods, shipped and flown in from all over the world and from farms that are often as big and as undistinctive as their conventional monocultural lookalikes.”

Rose’s argument is not new and represents one side of a perceived schism in the organic sector with those who are committed to the organic movement – a philosophical as well as practical position – suggesting that many new entrants see organic as no more than a collection of on-farm production techniques and supply chain assurance measures that, if applied and recognised, will attract a price premium.

Those committed to the organic movement bemoan what’s become cast as the ‘conventionalisation’ of organic production and supply systems and worry that this process erodes trust, compromises quality and limits access to markets for those ‘genuinely’ committed to organic production and so operating from a higher cost base. And it certainly is the case that the price premium has attracted new entrants to organic production, many of whom do apply organic standards to the same kinds of monocultural systems, supply chains and business practices as are used by ‘conventional’ producers. (Of course, agribusinesses and the big retails argue that they are democratising organic products – reducing prices and increasing access, whilst at the same time increasing demand and opportunities for producers: wherever they are in the world.)

Organic certification bodies have struggled to capture the economic and social elements that should complement the environmental aspects of organic production and supply in their standards. It is therefore perfectly possible for organisations and businesses with no real interest in the philosophy of organic production to produce food that meets a given set of standards, yet makes no contribution to a more generalised understanding of sustainability. Part of the problem is the difficulty of coming up with a set of practices and measurements that will consistently deliver and capture the sorts of social goods that the organic movement feels organic production should deliver. Another important factor is the time at which the first standards were written; in the 70s a technocratic approach to certification presented an opportunity for the older organisations to escape an at times slightly difficult history and once those standards had been written it proved hard to find space for anything that couldn’t easily be quantified.

Personally I have a lot of sympathy with Rose’s position, yet through my work for Provenance I’ve noticed that conventionalisation isn’t a one way street – or at least that the boundaries between organic and conventional systems are fuzzy.

A prime example is Home Farm Nacton, a 2500 acre estate on the Suffolk coast. The farm produces field scale vegetables and cereals for the conventional market and in the late 1990s it began a rolling process of organic certification to Soil Association standards – now over 300 acres are organic. As this has happened, far from the organic land becoming ‘conventionalised’ the rest of the farm has become much more organic: mechanical weeding and companion planting have almost completely eliminated pesticide and herbicide use in the conventional rotations whilst manure, compost and lay crops have significantly reduced the need for synthetic fertilizers.

Though much of Home Farm’s production still goes to the supermarkets (marketing 300 acres of organic vegetable production locally would be almost impossible at present), a significant trade with smaller shops, box schemes, caterers and wholesalers has begun to develop and continues to grow. Farm manager Andy Williams believes that organic production has made him think more about the rest of the land and “farm better”.

Unlike many of the really big vegetable producers (whose holding run into tens on thousands of acres here and on the continent), Home Farm Nacton is still family owned and is still very much part of the community and so, perhaps, is not open to the criticism of ‘conventionalisation’ in the first place. Nevertheless it does demonstrate that organic production can capture the spirit of the movement and effect wider change on larger farms where not all the land is certified.

The speakers, Prof. Martin Wolfe, Patrick Mulvany, Dr. Julia Wright and Dr. Michel Pimbert, argued that taking an agroecological approach to agriculture could help address environmental issues while maintaining and increasing food production: indeed, this was a key finding of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which DFID Ministers approved in June 2008. More recently the APPG report “Why no thought for food” has recommended that DFID should implement (as well as approve) the IAASTD findings. The implications of the IAASTD and APPG findings are a need for fundamental changes to agricultural policy and practice, if hunger is to be averted in ways that will ensure equity and restore the environment.

Patrick Mulvany, senior policy adviser to Practical Action and co-chair of the UK Food Group, began the meeting with an overview of agroecology and a call for an increase and strengthening of agricultural knowledge, science and technology (AKST) towards agroecological sciences (as recommended by the IAASTD). He wryly observed that agroecological approaches – often farmer controlled, invariably low cost, generally focusing on smaller landowners and never dependent on expensive proprietary inputs – unlike new crop varieties or synthetic inputs, do not generate income through licensing. As a result they were of little interest to ‘UK Plc’.

The two presentations that followed focused on examples of agroecological approaches in action. In the first Prof. Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Centre , talked about Waklyns Agroforestry, his own research farm in Suffolk. Martin explained that modern agriculture tended toward monocultures which are high yielding and require little labour input but are not particularly resilient (to, for example, climate variability or disease) and so are reliant on the unsustainable use of artificial inputs. By contrast diverse systems (both within and between species) like Waklyns produce high (complex) yields, are resilient and sustainable but do require a higher labour input.

For the last 12 years Dr. Julia Wright has carried out ground-breaking work on the coping strategies of Cuba’s food system in the absence of fuel, agrochemical and food imports (this research is captured in her 2008 book: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba). Her presentation (see below) described a project that developed rainwater harvesting and water protection strategies for drought resistance in Cuba. The first two slides also provide a useful comparison between agroecological and industrial approaches to agriculture.

As I’ll be writing about some of the activities ECCE-Bio is involved in over the next few months I thought some background information would be helpful.

Developing international links

In 2001 two organic farmers from Norfolk, encouraged by Clive Peckham of East Anglia Food Link, visited the El Tamiso organic producer cooperative in Padua, Italy, to learn about their direct and cooperative marketing initiatives.

Nine years on that initial relationship has evolved into ECCE-Bio, a European cooperative of five organic producer organizations involved in an exchange of people, expertise, information, and inspiration. At the heart of this organization is a common vision that in order to change the current industrial and impersonal food system (rather than be subsumed by it), the organic world has to create an alternative model that works. This model is based on ‘convivial economics’; developing real long-term relationships with like-minded organic producers and consumers, ensuring not only a more stable and fairer market, but an open exchange of expertise and information.

In 2008 the decision was taken to create a formal organization as a means not only to create a common image, a common message, and common resources, but also as a common platform to put forward cooperative, ecological and ethical message to a wider audience.

Two years later, and having weathered the recession, ECCE-Bio’s members are keen to find new partner groups of farmers and growers and new projects to work on. ECCE-Bio’s members are particularly interested in work that focuses on farmer-led knowledge and advocacy networks, crop genetic diversity (including issues such as seed exchange, GM and IPRs), and that challenges the ‘conventionalisation’ of the organic sector.

ECCE-Bio’s founder members are:

Somerset Organic Link
La Terra e Il Cielo
Leitrim Organic Farmers
El Tamiso
Agricola Pueblos Blancos

Download the ECCE-Bio Charter…