Larsson is an agricultural commodities broker who writes from Sainte Anne de Bellevue, Quebec.
Last January, I wrote an opinion piece in this newspaper criticizing leaders in the organic movement for the lack of progress in organic acreage in Canada.
At the time I was also criticizing the zero tolerance policies for genetically modified organism contamination of organic grains and other utopian and unrealistic standards put forth by hobby farmers, health food enthusiasts, academics and environmentalists that seem to be making the decisions in Canada about organic farming.
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Who is speaking for the commercial organic farmer?
I criticized the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada in Nova Scotia for being completely out of touch with the business side of organics, which after all, drives prices and markets and makes the real difference to producers. I seemed to be the only one to say the OACC’s business analysis was a joke, but recently Laura Telford of Canadian Organic Growers finally admitted as much in a recent article in the Western Producer.
Let’s get one truth straight here: organics is made up of two groups of people who have completely different priorities, one being ideological and consumer driven, and the other being the business of commercial farming and its support industries.
Consumers and other advocates don’t have to worry about rules and costs. They just go to the organic section of the supermarket and buy what they want, and it usually comes from outside of Canada. They say it’s a pity that organic demand has grown but not organic acreage, but they just don’t get it because they do not farm commercially.
I am not talking here about hobby farmers or gardeners who make up most of COG’s members, I am talking about people who farm commercially, and try to farm organically. If they don’t succeed organically, they are still farming. They don’t have the option to change careers and move to Vancouver.
Many of these people do not have time to go to meetings that impact their future. I have done business with some of the largest organic farms in Canada and it seems most of them are not involved in policy.
I have been arguing for 15 years now that the biggest problem in organics is a lack of business-minded leadership. Apparently people still aren’t getting the message.
And the people who are actually trying to represent the farmers’ best interests are being shut up and shut out. Paddy Doherty, the fellow I criticized before for promoting zero tolerance policies that make it harder to farm, is now promoting an unrepresentative council to fix the problems of organics.
And according to the Western Producer, Wally Hamm is being shut out.
Hamm, a leading certifier in Saskatchewan, will not get a seat on the council because of some politically correct notion to represent everyone in Canada, whether there are organic farms there or not.
Hamm points out that Saskatchewan organic grain and livestock farmers will be represented to the same level as the Yukon Territories. Hamm is right and furthermore is standing up for farmers’ interests when he criticizes the new Canadian organic system that will double certification costs once the Canadian Food Inspection Agency gets involved.
We are already losing organic farmers because the rules are too strict and the costs of transition are difficult and the market is poorly developed because the focus has been on the consumer and not the farmer.
So the answer is to create a bigger bureaucracy and more costs? The bureaucratic answer might suit a university professor or a member of Greenpeace, but not the farmers, because farmers don’t have the time to spend years in meetings creating the perfect world on paper.
So the question is: who is this organic rule for, anyway?
Most people would think the new organic rule is for farmers, but there is a case to be made that it is an invention of the emerging organic bureaucracy. Many would think the CFIA rule was for the farmers, but that’s not true, apparently.
It is really all about the consumers and always has been. This is unfortunate and will be the demise of organics in Canada. Organics has relied on manipulating consumers with fear marketing to the point that consumers are afraid of their food.
Organics should have been about a more sustainable, low input farming system, but it has come to be all about fear and rules.
The problem with consumers is generally they don’t have a clue about business, farming or science. This creates a perfect marketing scenario, but it doesn’t necessarily benefit farmers, because the rules become strict and expensive, and all these costs get downloaded on the farmer to assuage the consumers’ fear.
So it becomes obvious that consumer interests are not the same as farmer interests. Organics has never seemed to absorb this fact. Consumers are already well represented in our society by the supermarkets and their lowest price policies. The consumers really don’t need anyone else going to bat for them. The new organic structures in Canada really need to be represented well by those with the farmers’ bottom line at heart.
In the early 1990s at the Guelph organic conference, I went up to the microphone and warned the organic crowd about getting the government involved. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it and then you will be sorry. The same happened in the United States with the organic rule. The organic policy crowd screamed for a rule and when they got it, they say they don’t like it.
That’s the universal problem with letting bureaucrats and academics write the rules. They know not what they do, and the fallout hits the farmers and businessmen, not them. Fundamentally, if all our organic foods end up coming from Brazil and Mexico, it won’t really impact the consumer at all, and it will create a wonderful global bureaucracy of fair trade organic do-gooders who buy their Brazilian organic nuts at the mega store built where the farm used to be, now covered in pavement.
