This was originally posted, I thought, yesterday (June 26th) but I didn't have the right button clicked so that it did not get posted. I think this has finally been corrected. I hope that, from now on, I'll have all my buttons together and won't have to go back to actually make the post appear where it should. Ah technology!
WHF Post #3: Triggering the Blog: Organics
Confession: Originally as they developed, I thought the alternative agrifood movements were a joke and refused to take them seriously. This continued until 1989. What changed my mind was when organics, which had been piddling along well under the 1% level of total US ag production suddenly popped over the 1% figure.This happened when, within a period of less than two months, the US experienced three environmental horror stories that filled the US newspapers: the Alar crisis, the “discovery” of two cyanided grape berries in a whole shipload of Chilean grapes, and Exxon Valdez. I won’t recap those stories but, for about six weeks, the papers across the nation were full of them and, in California, California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) reported that the phones were “ringing off the hooks.” (I can provide documentation if there are any skeptics.)
I’ve always focused my research on mainstream or conventional ag although, as every movements started in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I kept an eye on them. They struck me as interesting, worth watching, but no significant challenge to production agriculture. When I attended the first gathering of California organic farmers (that later became the very successful annual Eco conference at Asilomar), I walked out shaking my head in disappointment. I could elaborate but, the turn to the state to regulate the meaning of “organic” struck me as foolish. Tim Vos later wrote this up in a paper in Ag & Human Values in 2000 (Vol. 17. No. 3) that pretty much said the same.
I was teaching the political economy of ag at the time and students had begun to pick up the message of alternativeness (mainly organics and, as this was brought “home”, Community Supported Agriculture). I didn’t like to discourage them but I really didn’t think much of either organics or CSA until that critical 6 week period. Even then, while I still had some reservations, I knew that we were entering a new period of development. Despite people around UC Santa Cruz like Patricia Allen, Margaret FitzSimmons, David Goodman, Julie Guthman, and others not at UCSC, who were beginning work on the alternatives, I stayed focused on research conventional agriculture.
Through those years, however, I continued to watch the movements grow, some slowly, and some very rapidly: organics, Fair Trade, later Slow Food, CSAs, etc. And as the grad students began to do research on the alternative movements, a sympathetic but critical literature began to develop.
I took this literature seriously. To understand why, you need to know that before I became an academic, I had been what was called in Cesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers (UFW) union, a “lifer” (dedicated to the movement for life) except that in my movement we were called “professional revolutionaries” (PRs). When it finally became clear that “there wasn’t gonna be no revolution,” burnt out I turned to academia. But the experience I had had in what would nowadays be called “organizing” proved to be extremely valuable in my academic life.
It became clear to me that what was driving the explosive growth of organics was the continual assault on US consumers of food horror stories. When I had been a PR, what was supposed to be the driving force for revolution was the proletariat and the contradictions of capitalism. The driving force for organics, became clear to me, was these relentless horror stories (which continue to this day).
What was also happening with USDA’s subversion of the organics standards. This confirmed my skepticism at the decision at that first organics meeting to turn to the state. When you do that, the state generally ignores you. But when Congress tells you to do something, you do it, even if you drag your feet. And when USDA was forced to do something it doesn’t believe in, they sought to subvert. And that’s been the history of turning to the state. The lesson is: when you turn to the state, you are playing on its court by its rules, and it has been playing with the big boys for decades.
I didn’t know this at that time but there was a model that could have been used: Demeter, the Rudolf Steiner agricultural remnant. I’m not a devotee of Demeter – I have considerable skepticism about the efficacy of burying cow horns to improve soil fertility, but I don’t want to get into the details of Demeter. I just want to use it as a model. The way Demeter works is that it has a detailed code of how to do agriculture (the web site can be found at: http://www.demeter-usa.org/; you need to explore around to get to the regulations) that is ”owned” by the organization, not by the state. If you subscribe to their regs and inspections, you can use the Demeter label.
So there is a way to avoid putting your movement at the mercy of the state. You can’t totally avoid the state but you can try to limit your exposure to it.
As I continued research on mainstream ag, keeping an increasingly interested eye on the alternative movements, and the academics who were researching them and writing sympathetic but critical articles, I was struck few seemed to know about alternative models of organization that might minimize exposure to the state and its subversions.
I knew a bit about the Harvard Business School (HBS) and how it carried on its mission of research by building cases that generated a comparative literature on how and why some businesses succeed and others fail, the influence of internals structures, external and “environmental” developments, problems of family succession, etc. HBS builds cases which are used to reproduce their MBA grad students. I asked myself: why don’t we have something like that? I recognized that the likelihood that anyone would come along with a couple of hundred million bucks to found such a school had a probability ranging around 0.00000001%.
I filed that idea away but continued to brood on it: how would something following the HBS model be developed? It couldn’t be at one university, nor could it be in a distinct department at that non-existent university. What was clear was that there were good researchers working on the alternative movements, producing a literature that was, in typical academic fashion, cumulative but which accumulates very, very slowly. If you have a school at a single university with faculty and students interacting continuously, a lot of frontier-pushing gets done fairly rapidly. Could we do something like this with the alternative agrifood researchers (what I’ve been calling “agrifoodies”)? How might it work, how would we communicate. How might we bring our graduate students into this “school’? Or, more accurately, since grad students are usually more inquisitive, enquiring, flexible, and with greater energy than established faculty members, how can our grad students bring us faculty into some kind of organization which would overcome the physical distances between us to overcome the fact that we are spread through many different universities and disciplines.
I’m not trying to insist that the criticism I see as primordial (turning to the state to regulate the word “organic”) is necessarily as correct as I think it is. Julie Guthman, for example, has reservations about that. Maybe I’m wrong. But what is clear to almost every critical academic that researches the organics movement is that it has been thoroughly conventionalized. And, according to what I can find out, a lot of the early organics pioneers have dropped out of certification.
If so, let’s get a discussion going on organics – and Fair Trade, Slow Food, etc. – about what mistakes were made, what might have been done, what models might there be to avoid the mistakes, etc.
Tomorrow, I’ll expose my ignorance about Fair Trade, which I haven’t watched as closely as organics. I don’t want to put myself forward as an expert on any of the movements. What I want to see is a coherent and cumulative development of critical analyses of each and all of them, and a search for potential models that might be suggested to specific movements to minimise mistakes.
I am also painfully aware that the kinds of critical analyses that we agrifoodies might generate will probably NOT be the kinds of problems that concern the leadership and activists in the various movements. This is a serious problem which I intend to address in future posts. For the moment, however, I am convinced that, if we agrifoodies can get ourselves coherently intellectually organized, we might be able to start talking with movement activists and addressing their concerns.
Bill Friedland
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3 comments:
Interesting points, and I agree about the need for much more case study based research. Here in SA there seems to be a case for using the state to set a benchmark for organic standards though. The lack of a national organic standards has meant a proliferation of all kinds of agents, often acting for European supermarkets, who will certify things as organic that fall well short of e.g. British soil association standards. And the subversion of organic standards you are concerned about happens just as easily when the regulation is private - only it often does so less transparently and with less opportunity to challenge it...
i would like to amplify bill's post #3 on organic . . .
bill has suggested that, in taking a turn to the state, the organic movement commited a primordial error, because the movement rejected the alternative of private organization (e.g., steiner) . . .
first, i would want to make clear that there was a very lively debate at the time about the turn to the state . . . to my knowledge, the history of how the turn to the state carried the day is yet to be written . . .
second, when that history is written, i think it will show among other things that the private turn was not feasible . . . there was not at the time a generally accepted national organic organization, as ifoam is internationally . . . instead there were regional leaders (e.g., oregon tilth, california cof, the rodale organization) . . . hopefully the history will elucidate whether these regional leaders ever considered collaborating on a private national standard . . . to my knowledge, they did not . . .
so, if the private turn was not feasible, the turn to the state was the best available strategy . . .
third, the concern at the time was that organic was going to take off (for the reasons bill has suggested) and that, absent government regulation, any producer or processor could make a legal organic claim . . . the turn to the state was a way of putting some limitations on the "organic" claim . . .
i'll leave it to others to evaluate whether on balance the turn to the state was beneficial or detrimental for the organic movement . . . but i think it is important to see the turn to the state as a reasoned choice rather than primordial ignorant error . . .
cheers,
craig
I agree with most of Craig's comment on the history of the turn to the state that the organics people made when they made their decision. But there are two points I'd like to make to amplify my original post in response to Craig.
First, Craig is correct in pointing out that the history of the decision to turn to the state for regulation is yet to be written but I'm not sure it was a reasoned decision at that moment. There were various organizations floating around such as CCOF, Oregon Tilth, etc., but no national "agreement" on what organics was. There was, however, IFOAM, the international movement organization. Why wasn't there an orientation toward IFOAM's standards or orientations? I attended the first meeting of the organics people and their turn to the state seemed to me to be less reasoned than desperate, i.e., they wanted some way of enforcing organic standards and therefore turned to the state since they had existing models of "normal" legislation and marketing orders.
Secondly, even if the decision was reasoned and reasonable at the time, there should be a lesson learned from the turn to the state, i.e., don't look to the state for solutions to your alternative explorations unless you are truly desperate because, when you do, you play on the same field as the "big boys" and they have more experience, history, money, and power than you do.
It's the concept of MINIMIZATION that I want to emphasize, not only to the state but also the market. It's impossible to avoid or bypass the state or market but it is feasible, if not very easy, to minimize vulnerability to some degree to either or both.
And as Andries points out, in South Africa going to private organizations also had its vulnerabilities since some are tough in setting and enforcing standards whereas other are looser. This raises the issue of what to do about loose-to-fraudulent private organizations, a topic I'll include in my report on the Seoul World Congress of Rural Sociology from which I returned a week ago.
Bill Friedland
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