Are Standards and Regulations of Organic Farming Moving Away from Small Farmers’ Knowledge?

Organic farming is a promising agricultural method with positive effects on the human ecological and social environment. Governments have taken over a major role in defining organic farming by creating legal standards. Many countries all over the world have estabChristian R. Vogl is affiliated with the Institute for Organic Farming, University for Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences (BOKU), Gregor Mendel Strasse 33, A-1180, Vienna, Austria (E-mail: [email protected]). Lukas Kilcher is affiliated with the Research Institute Organic Farming Organic Agriculture (FiBL), Frick, Switzerland. Hanspeter Schmidt is Attorney-at-Law, Oberlandesgericht Karlsruhe, Germany. Address correspondence to: Christian R. Vogl at the above address. The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript for this paper. The paper is dedicated to Severin Biberauer († 2003) for his enthusiastic support for organic farming and for his contributions to this paper. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, Vol. 26(1) 2005 Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JSA  2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J064v26n01_03 5 lished a certification and accreditation system in order to protect the justified expectations of consumers with regard to processing and controlling the product quality of organic goods and to protecting producers from fraudulent trade practices. As they are relevant to international trade, these standards do not only influence the organic farming movement on the national level but also have a converse impact across national borders. Organic farming was established in a bottom-up process as farmers aimed to design sustainable ways of using natural resources. Farmers’ traditional knowledge and their awareness of ecological, as well as, of social affairs was the main base for the development of organic farming. Since public interest in organic farming has grown rapidly, the ownership on the process of defining organic farming is no longer in the hands of farmers and the original principles and aims of the movement seem to be threatened by a bureaucratic view of “recipe”-organic farming. However, unsolved problems also exist between the necessities of global harmonization and the local adaptability of the standards on organic farming. This paper structures the current discussion and gives future prospects for further development. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website:  2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]