Rigby, D and S.Bown (2003) Organic Food and Global Trade: Is the Market Delivering Agricultural Sustainability? School of Economic Studies Discussion Paper, Manchester University. http://www.euroecolecon.org/frontiers/Contributions/F2papers/FD1paper.pdf

• “Organic is becoming what we hoped it would be an alternative to.”

Quote from the paper:
Clearly, the standards do not exist in a vacuum they represent an attempt to move from general principles, such as these from IFOAM, to specific practices and inputs, whether recommended or prohibited. The difficulty is that incorporating these wider concerns into standards for organic farming is problematical. Standards are far more able to refer to prohibited inputs than to deal with precise criteria for the assessment of whether producers and processors are acting in a manner which is “socially just” or “ecologically responsible”. The significance of this increases when one considers the massive expansion of the organic sector currently underway in many countries, where the motivations of newly converting organic producers may well be different from the ‘traditional’ organic producer who associated closely with these broader principles (see Fairweather and Campbell, 1996, for an early attempt to distinguish between ‘pragmatic’ and ‘committed’ organic producers).

Part of the difficulty here is that these organic schemes must focus on prohibiting or encouraging the use of particular inputs or tools, whereas it is the use of these inputs that determines a system’s sustainability. Stolze et al. (2000) argue that organic farming uses two methods to obtain environmental results: “the regulation of the use of inputs” and “the requirement of specific measures to be applied or, in some cases, of the outcome of environmental or resource use”. The authors confirm the emphasis on the regulation of inputs explaining that “the first method is more important and the second is more a supplement”(2000:ii).

This orientation on specific inputs is hardly surprising since these schemes require producers to either be registered or not; there can be no grey areas, the produce is sold either with the organic symbol, or without. The criteria must therefore be clear, well-defined and open to inspection. Objectives such as the sustainability of farm families, farm workers and rural communities, which are frequently espoused by organic groups, are simply not amenable to this type of regulation. Individual producers may be committed to such goals, but most standards do not include them, and it is difficult to see how they could.