The Organics Conundrum

The Terroirist has been away for a couple of weeks -- with presentation and participation at the 2012 Global Gateways conference (where I spoke on the institutional strength of farmers markets as a gateway drug -- more on that later), a week recouperating at home in Los Angeles and a week following in Provincetown, MA (both blissfully without internet access) -- and am now back to hit the ground running, after a much needed break from computers, analytics, and other such fun things.

One thing that caught me over the last several weeks has been the rising and recurring number of stories about the issue of organics standards. This isn't a new-ish thing: even wth its inception, the National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) has been in the crosshairs of everyone who has thought the issue of organics was ill-suited to regulation, from large scale corporations to smaller, orginator farmers who began the then unregulated but systematic organics movement. Coming along since then, there have been numerous instances of questionable regulatory decisions made by the body, usually over what are considered misunderstandings or misrepresentations of the science or disregard for the actual values of what the organics movement stands or stood for (one of the better articles in this is the fabulous Joan Dye Gussow article "Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified" -- which notes that it can, but do the principles behind organics as a movement want there to be such a thing. Really worth the read.) 

The most recent article to raise this question came from the New York Times last week, asking whether or not organics has gotten too big for its briches.  In the article, the author is alluding to two distinct issues at play with the NOSB, the organization that handles what can and cannot be constituted as organic products in the regulations: one, whether or not the constituent seats of the NOSB are effecting the integrity and perception of the National Organics Program, and two, whether or not the changes being made by the NOSB undermine organics in such a way as to make organics as a regulation and a label unreliable. 

First, a clarification: when we say organics in the context of the NOSB and the NOP, we are talking about a label and a series of regulations. (If you're looking for a rip-roaring good time of reading, you can evaluate the nature of the present rules here.) This should be seen as having a venn-diagram like overlap with the notion of organics as a series of values. When organics starting cropping up in the 1980's, organics was seen as an approach of soil remediation, environmental protection, and crop biodiversity reflecting the notion that the decades-long approach to farming was having a detrimental effect on soil health, as well as on the eating practices. To many, as indicated in the great book "Organic, Inc.", organics as value was as much about changing the eating habits of the population as it was changing the shape of farming itself. These two notions have been in tension since the inception of the NOP in 1997; many farmers and groups that utilized and promoted the term turned away from it because of fear that the regulatory board would eventually undermine the value of the concept. And even now, many groups fighting for (or in some ways, against) the NOSB are fighting by virtue of the values of organics, of which the regulatory rules are a part and parcel. 

Now as to the questions raised by the article, this is largely a matter of how you regard the nature of firms. Large multinationals grow through acquisition, not innovation. The buyout of organics, before we get to the dilution of the principles behind it, was something inevitable (especially with stagnating grocery prices and sales against organics value-added and niche dimensions). Many smaller firms courted by large industry prior to the establishment of the NOSB were promoting for more open-ended rules regarding specific compounds. This is especially true for preservatives, emulsifiers, and other products that, while constituting less than 5% of the overall constitution of the product, shift things like the nutriative value, extend shelflife, and in many cases have been known to have some claims to being toxic or potentially unhealthy. These products constitute the vast majority of cases where the NOSB has come up against opposition from nonprofits, consumer groups and the like. 

Here's where we come to the rub: the actor behavior we see with the NOSB -- especially the absense in the last decade of real farmers, consumer advocacy groups, or environmentalists, chemists, and biologists independent of industry connectons from the board -- has undermined much of the faith in the program from various farmers and institutional actors that have promoted it. In so doing, the plethora of alternatives -- from farmers labelling their product independently, to biodynamic certifications, to farmers laundry listing all the "NO's" of their farm work (no spray, no this, no that), that consumers are faced with a number of competing claims. Tack into it that they recieve the message from these parties that the organic certification label is broken, and slippage in the integrity of the regulations -- tho not necessarily the values -- has come into play. The firms acting within the NOSB are following standard firm behavior -- seeking out maximization of profit margins by extending the ways and means by which product can be enhanced or protecting investments in the field by adding new materials that skirt the letter of the regulations, and pushing the regulations to meet them. 

But speaking ot the impact to that, and the second point as well, the dilution of the regulations is minute in one way, but significant if you view organics as a series of values rather than a series of regulations. For purposes of regulations, most of these minute additions to the list are just that -- unwarrented and on a short list of items that typically constitute no more than 5% of products (in food stores) or trace elements in fertilizing and planting techniques. From a regulatory/firm perspective, these are minor shifts that do not, fundamentally, undermine the way the NOSB, the NOP, or organics as a regulatory system work. However, when you see organics as a series of values, much of what is being engaged with here is problematic -- from large firms buying up smaller players, in turn destroying their impact on local economies, growers, and subjecting their behavior to a more regimented corporatist firm behavior, to the issues of supplier behavior and payout, to whether or not the foods being produced under that label are actually in line with the idea of changing eating habits or producing healthy products -- and this has been, and is becoming moreso, a problem where the NOSB and the integrity of organic products are concerned. 

The Groupe Danone buyout of Stonybrook Farms is a key example. While the sale of Stonybrook expanded their marketshare and distribution (not to mention an influx of cash that sated the desires of the intial VC investors in Stonybrook), Stonybrook began to make a shift from organics as a system of values to organics as a regulatory framework. Within several years of the sale, many of Stonybrooks intial suppliers were told to scale up or end their contracts, with much of  the buying being transferred to the dairy cooperative CROPP; the addition of multiple product lines that expanded marketshare but also ran afoul of previous statements to not advertise products to children; and the continued statements from Gary Hirschberg that expanded marketshare of organic products was more important than the notion of organics itself. This is not an uncommon case, but one of the earliest, and one of the case studies in how the acquisition of food companies is not the same as the acquisition of tech firms, a case I've attempted to make several times now.

When one considers the questions raised above, one has to define where they stand on the organics spectrum -- and it is just that. Personally, I feel it is fine to view organics as both a series of values as much as a regulatory scheme. It's okay for one to believe that one has to take a whole systems approach -- to reject the organic twinkie as it were -- as much as it is ok to simply view it as a holistic agricutural and food production system with minimum inputs. But the latter, the regulatory project, must remain sincere and have the integrity to still abide by the core concept -- removing as much as possible, adding as little as needed, and revitalizing as much land and ecology as possible. And that last bit is clearly questionable when we look at the evidence. Organics is still a burgeoning market -- hitting nearly 22 billion in sales in the United States alone, and one of the few sectors of the grocery aisle still growing. So this issue is not going away. However, if the industry isn't going to collapse on itself, it needs both greater degrees of independent agency on the NOSB board, as well as more activity from consumers and co-producers to see that it sticks to it. Farmers who decry the regulations do well by informing consumers, but do more harm when they do not actively agitate or organize to maintain the integrity of the program. Organics are not the only program, but they are the most prominent and well known public example of environmentally conscious consumer goods, and we do best to try across the board to preserve the integrity of the program.