What Guarantee System is Needed for Developing Countries’ Own Markets?

Developing countries are not a homogeneous group; actually, they are less homogeneous than most industrialised countries. Therefore it is very difficult to make general statements on what systems of guarantees they will need. It is fair to assume that a generic development would be fairly similar to the one experienced in Europe 20 years ago. A group of produc­ers agree among themselves to follow the same standards, and they intro­duce a common label to identify their products in the marketplace. Over time a need for quality assurance is identified. Initially this can be done internally in the group. An independent external certification is intro­duced later as a result of consumer or trade demand, competition with imported certified produce, or lack of trust among the producers.

But today there are many things that influence such a development. The development in foreign countries may give organic producers and organisations the impression that the only organic producer is a certified producer. Exporters in the country may push the authorities to implement mandatory regulations compatible with requirements in export markets. Therefore, in almost all cases domestic development will be heavily influ­enced from the outside and the likelihood is low that under such circum­stances they will develop alternative systems for quality assurance. Nevertheless, we should be supportive of such initiatives.

Biased Production Standards

Organic standards have been developed over a period of 25 years. The main force in this development has been the organic producers them­selves. Lately governments also have become engaged in developing organic standards. It is unavoidable that the concerns of interested parties participating in the development of organic standards are accommodated better than are the interests of those who do not participate or are ex­cluded. This has led to biases in organic standards in industrialised coun­tries, i.e., the export markets. There are numerous examples of this:

Local production problems in Europe justify the use of a nonorganic input while production problems that are unique for a developing country are not recognised.

The constraints of existing production systems are recognised for European producers by means of various derogations and exemptions, while the same understanding does not apply to developing countries. Animal production standards offer many examples.

In most cases this leads to discrimination against imported produc­tion. In a few cases, however, it may be the other way around: specific environmental problems in European countries are addressed while others that might be relevant in a developing country are neglected.

Biased Inspection and Certification Requirements

The whole inspection and certification industry has been developed in a Western style, with our ideas on how to ensure quality, how to create confidence, how to be independent, and so forth. This often corresponds poorly with traditions, cultures and existing infrastructures in developing countries. For producers the requirements are very difficult.

• In Europe all fields are registered on official maps, and nowadays even animals are individually registered. However, in many develop­ing countries no maps are available, and even if there are maps, many people are not trained to use them in a relevant way.
• In Europe most farmers can read and write and are accustomed to fill­ing out all kinds of forms to receive their subsidies. However, in many developing countries only a minority of farmers can read and write and they are not accustomed to forms.

The requirements on certification bodies are increasing all the time. Two problems that need to be addressed are:

• the inspection of smallholder groups
• the requirement that certification bodies shall fulfil ISO 65.

The ‘normal’ inspection requirement for organic farms is that each farmer shall be visited by the certification programme every year. This does not work well for smallholder groups of perhaps 5,000 farmers, as has been recognised by the organic movement for many years. Therefore, systems have been developed based on:

• internal control by a local organisation
• evaluation of the internal control system
• random inspection by external certification

One reason for these systems can be found in these figures:

• Cost of one farm inspection by one foreign inspector: US$50-100
• Annual value of production of smallholder:US$100-1000

In extreme cases, the costs of inspection and certification can equal the total value of production, and at best come down to 5% if the external certification agency must inspect each individual farm. With an internal control system that is externally evaluated, the cost of external certifi­ca­tion, if done well, can drop to 1-2%. (There are many examples of certifi­cation that are much cheaper, but their quality is questionable.) It should be kept in mind that the costs for operating the internal control system may be in the same range, so the total cost for certification still is high.

French authorities have blocked several loads of organic coffee because they did not fulfil the requirements for external inspection. EU member states seem to have realised that this may be something of a problem and are preparing various documents to deal with the situation. Hopefully they will avoid excessively detailed criteria, but more likely they will invent a new set of cumbersome rules. The simple solution would be for them to refer to the IFOAM Accreditation criteria that actu­ally covers this well.

The inspection itself can be very cumbersome. In most Western countries there is an idea that all fields should be inspected by the external certification bodies (there is debate over whether EEC 2092/91 actually requires this). Again, there is a big difference between farming situations where the land is laid out in a few very large fields (the USA offers an outstanding example), or where plots are scattered over wide areas, which often take hours to reach by foot. In such situations, inspection of all fields increases the costs greatly. If inspection were more oriented to risks and critical control points, some of this walking could be reduced and more energy spent on real problems.

The Requirements for Certification Organisations

Last year the emphasis of this discussion was on the introduction of the ISO 65 (EN 45011) requirement introduced by the European Union. In this context several issues must be recognised.

For EU certification bodies, the EU regulation requires compliance with ISO 65 (EN 45011), not accreditation. As a result, certification bod­ies in several EU countries are not accredited by their national accredita­tion programmes. The EU regulation on imports requires equi­valence to the EU rules, so the regulation itself does not require either compliance with ISO 65 or accreditation for imports. In reality, however, the interpre­tation of equivalence is very strict and tends to mean identical.

The guiding paper 7607/VI/97rev.3 inserts the requirements of com­pliance with standards EN 45011 or the ‘standard’ ISO 65. It also intro­duces ‘accreditation by the official accreditation body designated in the third country’ as the only option for accreditation. It is further men­tioned that such a body ‘preferably should be subject to international mutual rec­ognition agreements’ by the International Accreditation Forum. However the IAF does not have a mutual recognition agreement that covers ISO 65. Furthermore, the mem­bership list of the IAF includes only ten developing countries and only two CEE countries. ISO 65 accreditation therefore is not an available option for most countries out­side the EU, and clearly acts as a technical barrier to trade.

It is amazing that more effort is not oriented toward assessing the actual value of ISO 65 for organic certification instead of all the efforts made to comply with this norm. Why are we accepting all this?

The IFOAM accreditation system is another option for a Third World certifier. But there are three main problems associated with this:

• The requirements as such are high, and many certifiers will not comply.
• Because of the desire to get IFOAM accreditation accepted by gov­ernments, there is a tendency to incorporate all governmental requirements into the program.
• Finally, at the moment there is no guarantee that IFOAM Accredita­tion will give recognition in export markets, even though it is clear that it is helpful.

Untransparent and Inconsistent Rules

There are few possibilities for stakeholders outside the EU to get correct information. The EU Commission and the member states do not normally communicate with private parties outside the EU, and European importers are the ones that must pass the information.

Unavailability of Local Certification Bodies

Apart from in Latin America, there are very few local certification bodies established in developing countries. In Africa and Asia there are only a few each. Even without regulations, it is already a big task to estab­lish local certification bodies, and as long as they are aiming for exports, the current regulatory situation in the EU makes it almost a waste of energy and money to establish such bodies, since their prospects for getting accep­tance are very bad regardless of their actual performance.

This list of problems facing developing countries can be made longer. For some people this still has no point, since they will just say that the customer is king and that as long as you want to sell, you must play by the customers’ rules. Such an argument has some validity, but it does not con­sider at all the broader agenda of the organic movement. Also, the rules are set not by organic consumers but by other interests. Trade is an important part of the organic movement. Organic trade can have an enor­mous positive impact on the development of organic agriculture in devel­oping countries, but this should not be at the cost of alienating organic producers in those countries from their own aspirations and their own agenda. The standards and certification regulations need to be brought down to earth again!

Generally speaking, I believe that IFOAM has proven itself more capable than governmental regulation in handling the various perspectives on organic farming in the world, and that a strengthening of the IFOAM guarantee system (IFOAM Basic Standards and the Accreditation Programme) will be beneficial for developing countries. But within our own system, we should be more aware of the actual risks in different systems and not just apply identical procedures all over our diverse globe. Developing countries have special problems that the prevailing certi­fica­tion systems have difficulty tackling, with corruption as a very obvious example, while in the areas where we are focussing attention in the West, there may be few problems.

I want to close with a message I got a few days ago from Franz van der Hoff, a pioneer of organic farming in Mexico and a representative of one of the major coffee exporters:

In general I am very concerned about what is going on in the field of eco­logical agriculture, above all the tremendous bureaucracy in Europe. Here in Mexico we are really concerned if we can continue to be certified because of the costs and paper hassle. You have to be an alphabetic [literate] farmer in order to be organic and the small farmers are heavily discriminated over against the big farmers and latifundios.

Several smaller organisations have decided to step out of the inspection and certification but continue to be organic, inspected etc. by Certimex and OCIA. That means that this coffee and other products only can get to the US/Canadian and Japanese markets. We do not know if IFOAM can do anything regarding the expen­sive and extensive bureaucracy of the Euro­pean authorities. We understand that the local certification bodies cannot do much about it.

Our main concern is that the new regulations create more inter­est in the paper work then in the physical real ecology. Instead of confronting possible fraud it only increases the possibilities of fraud. You can put all kinds of lies on paper. Also therefore they invented paper!