05/31/2022
With the news about contaminated organic strawberries being pulled off shelves as we speak, I thought it would be worthwhile to share why Food Alliance is the best third-party certification. Our standards are more robust in the field and in the packaging houses. We require the fruit and the packaging process to be certified if you are going to use our logo.
What’s wrong with organic?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with organic agriculture. Growing food without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and with attention to soil health is a great improvement over the industrialized form of agriculture that’s prevailed in the last half-century. Organic is the first and most broadly accepted food eco-label, and the organic community helped start the sustainable agriculture movement.
But the national organic certification standard is not a total solution for all the challenges found in agriculture and the food industry. It doesn’t guarantee, for example, that workers are treated well, that animals are raised humanely, or that wildlife habitat is protected and enhanced. Many organic farmers are also dissatisfied with the national organic standard and use the term “beyond organic” to describe their individual efforts to address these and other issues.
The limits of the national organic standard are becoming increasingly clear as organic production becomes more common. Organic started as a philosophy and way of farming espoused primarily by smaller scale farmers that reflected their close and personal relationship to the land. But under the national standard, as more and larger companies enter the market, organic is in danger of being reduced to a substitution of inputs–natural for synthetic. Some newer organic farms still operate largely according to conventional, industrial, input-intensive models, using management tools and approaches that cause social and environmental concern. Under these conditions, converting a growing number of acres to organic production will leave many of the problems we currently see in agriculture and the food industry unresolved.
That’s why Food Alliance believes a different and more comprehensive approach is needed. To ensure the sustainability of our food system we need standards that take into account a broader range of social and environmental concerns and evolving management strategies. Rather than focusing largely on inputs, Food Alliance looks more holistically at farming systems and management practices designed to deliver best possible social and environmental outcomes.
