Last month the EU Council issued a press release announcing agreement on a new EU organic farming EU organic farming regulation. This is actually a big deal, and I know a number of people who have been involved in the negotiations. It still has to be formally passed as a legislative package, but since the important parties have all agreed, this is likely just a formality. It will come into effect 1 July 2020, meaning it won’t fully be in force until the 2021 planting season, and consumers won’t fully see the changes until later that year after the harvest.
Not Perfect, and Lots of Compromises
This is not a perfect piece of legislation, and there’s still a long way to go towards reforming agriculture in Europe. Putting so much emphasis on organic food is flawed. Organic is a legally defined term, and is subject to different interpretations.
What we need in Europe is normal food, based on biodiversity, agroecology and grown and sold by small and local producers. This regulation goes some way towards these goals, but is not enough. This regulation gives too much control to large agricultural interests. In particular it doesn’t do enough to control pesticide use overall, doesn’t do enough to reduce and sequester greenhouse gas emissions and doesn’t really promote agroecology.
What it does do is make agroecology theoretically possible, as well as provide a few loopholes to the strict EU seed laws. It might mean fewer dangerous pesticides are used on food consumed in Europe. It will mean consumers have access to more biodiversity in their food, and there are potentially big gains to be had in the quality of food available.
These small gains have been fought fiercely by the food industry, who have pretty much guaranteed market dominance for themselves. The food industry is prepared in almost all ways to wait until a small farmer has a clever idea, then steal it and destroy the business model of the small farmer in the process.
Agroecology
This is a somewhat unfortunate term. It’s a bit like organic, in that it’s being co-opted by industrial agriculture. Like the term organic, it refers to what used to be normal agriculture. Different people have given it different names along the way, like permaculture or ecological. For some reason we’ve needed to invent yet another name for it, so different people can claim ownership over the idea and define it according to their own purposes. I use the term reluctantly, because it is what a lot of people are saying at the moment.
This is a term that describes a system of ‘normal’ agriculture, without chemical or unnatural inputs, generally operating in a closed system without any inputs. It’s principle is building soil over time — over centuries. It has very little to do with the 3 years without chemicals need to produce certified organic food. The consequence of building up soil is the sequestering of greenhouse gasses. The system is very fragile, and any contamination with chemicals at all generally causes very long term damage. It depends on large tracts of adjoining land, also based on agroecology, in order to maintain biodiversity and habitats for beneficial organisms.
This new organic regulation envisages patches of certified organic land, side by side conventional farms, where the classification of the land changes back and forth over time, and has little to do with agroecology or maintaining ecosystems and building soils.
The relationship between conventional and organic producers is somewhat like public smoking. The use of pesticides damages the public health and environment. A short term solution is isolating conventional farmers in their own regions, but in the long term no one will be happy with that solution, so eventually it will be necessary to phase out the use of pesticides. The pesticide industry is however very powerful and deceptive, and difficult to deal with.
Pesticide Industry
What this organic regulation really does is significantly strengthen the position of the pesticide industry. The pesticide manufacturers are already facing competition from old unpatented products like glyphosate. Using very deceptive public campaigns, designed to look like some sort of activists’ issue, they are using organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to promote their products — even to the extent of staging fake European Citizens’ Initiatives.
Not only is this likely to continue, but as the older products are removed from the market, new ones will take their place. Since the definition of organic is subject to formal and strict interpretation, they are very likely to find ways of including their products in the food chain. For example, they may develop new products based on GMOs, used in food packaging or that can be used on perimeters of organic land without actually contaminating the food grown on them, but possibly causing a great deal of damage to the ecosystem.
There are likely to be a lot more grey lines in the use of pesticides in organic agriculture, and still a lot more battles to be fought. It’s going to be more important than ever to buy food from local producers that you know personally, trust and don’t have enough money to spend it on pesticides.
