The Controversy has kept on coming for the organics category over the last quarter, with press speculation and Soil Association (SA) announcements widening the chasm between those who believe in the ethics underpinning the category and those who maintain it is a lifestyle choice.
The great airfreight debate has continued to dominate hearts and minds, with the SA finally publishing its proposed changes to standards governing whether food flown in to the UK can be certified as organic or not, last October.
The standards board’s decision that food can only be certified organic and airfreighted to the UK if it delivers a tangible benefit to farmers in developing countries has been met with a mixed reaction from the fresh produce industry.
In future, airfreighted food will have to match up to either the SA’s own Ethical Trade standards or the Fairtrade Foundation’s stipulations, and licensees to the SA will be obliged to reduce their dependence on airfreight.
The Fresh Produce Consortium (FPC) has made its views on the proposed changes very clear. “In essence, nothing has changed since our initial reaction to the proposals in October,” Nigel Jenney, chief executive of the FPC, tells FPJ. “We appreciate why the SA has chosen to hold the debate, but we feel it is fundamentally flawed - the footprint of fresh produce, especially of airfreighted produce, is actually lower than some of the non-fruit and vegetable items that the SA happily labels as organic.”
But others support the SA’s decision. In a local newspaper report, box scheme specialist Riverford Organic Vegetables urged consumers to resist buying out-of-season airfreighted produce. “There is absolutely no need to fly produce in from all over the world, when we can grow such a huge variety of fruit and veg in the UK,” the firm’s Bill and Andrea Donnelly were reported as saying. “If fresh produce has to be imported, it should come by ship and from closer to home. The SA says that airfreighting produces over 177 times the greenhouse gases of shipping; that is just not an option for anyone who cares about the future of the planet,” they added.
Others were ambiguous in their approach to the debate. One insider tells FPJ: “I think the SA should concentrate on what it does best - monitoring organic accreditation - and leave the public to decide whether or not it wishes to purchase airfreighted produce.”
A second stage of consultation on this contentious issue is to take place in February, although no date has yet been set. The FPC and other parties will be closely involved with the remaining consultation period over the course of this year. “Perhaps it is now time to ask the other accreditation bodies to come off the fence and give their views during the second phase,” urges Jenney.
On the sales front, Christmas was set to be an organic one for many families last year, despite the rising cost of organic food. Box scheme sales rose by 53 per cent to
£146 million in 2007, with one insider telling FPJ that Christmas in particular saw sales peak. “The public really like box schemes - they feel like it’s a good value format, and like they are giving something back to the environment,” he says.
“While sales of organics in the big supermarkets were stable in 2007, it was box schemes that generated the biggest growth for the category right through last year. This situation is not unique to the UK - organic box schemes on the continent, in particular in Scandinavia, are also really taking off,” he adds.
In other developments, the health issue surrounding organics has continued to rage, and while the campaigns to kick-start organic sales as part of the New Year health drive have begun in earnest, yet more research has reared its head suggesting that organic fruit and veg purportedly really is better for you.
A four-year EU study conducted at Newcastle University is alleged to be showing that organic fruits and vegetables contain up to 40 per cent more antioxidants than their conventional counterparts, as well as higher levels of iron and zinc. Professor Carlo Leifert, who heads the research, reportedly said the differences were so marked that eating organic produce could make up for not eating the recommended five fruit and veg portions a day. However, once the leaked findings made the national press, Leifert backtracked to an extent, and told FPJ that the full picture will be revealed by the middle of this year.
The reports rather predictably forced the UK’s Food Standards Agency to review its previous statement that there is no difference between conventional and organic foods, however. There have also been some less than positive reports released, suggesting that the organics claim is not always all it is cracked up to be. At the start of the year, the Daily Mail published a damning report stating that “thousands of tonnes of organic vegetables sold in British shops this year [2007] were produced using toxic chemical pesticides... it emerged that increasing numbers of potato farmers have been asking for special permission to use large amounts of copper fungicide over the summer and autumn”. The newspaper reported that copper compounds were “1,000 times more toxic than fungicides used on non-organic potatoes”.
But the SA hit back at the article. The organisation only allows the use of copper when disease is a major threat to the crop - but still insists that the amount used by non-organic farmers is tiny compared to the amount used on conventional farms, it said.
The wet summer forced many potato growers to apply for copper usage as the right conditions for the spread of potato blight struck. But the SA believes it is a triumph that fewer than 30 per cent were forced to do so. Two-thirds managed purely through the use of blight-resistant varieties, crop rotations and burning or chopping infected vegetation, which the SA believes is “good news, contrary to the Daily Mail’s doom and gloom report”.
The path for the sector looks set to remain muddy in 2008, as experts predict sales will continue to grow, but perhaps not at the rapid pace to which the category has become accustomed. According to a survey carried out by Whole Earth Foods, 61 per cent of shoppers are turning their backs on organics because they are failing to steer a path through the jargon surrounding the sector. Some 23 per cent of those surveyed believe it is healthier in some way, but 13 per cent were unclear on the difference between organic and food miles. Are some clearer definitions needed to reinvigorate produce sales over the coming year?
ROWLANDS’ REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
Apple farming is not just an income for us - it is our way of life, say organic fruit producers Eric Rowlands and his wife Janet, who supply Norman Collett with fresh product from their farm on the Sussex-Kent border.
Eric studied at Hadlow College, and after working for a short while in London, became a tenant at Great Sanders Fruit Farm, which is a 445-hectare site formerly owned by Southern Water. We farm 16.8ha of land, which in 1990 we were forced to convert to organic in order to prevent chemicals seeping into the natural catchment reservoir on the site.
A year ago, Southern Water sent us a letter saying they were putting the farm on the open market, and as the current tenants we had first refusal to put in an offer. This farm was all we have ever had, so we felt it was rightfully ours and decided to buy it - but that meant we had to sell our house in Battle. We were then forced to live in a tent in a barn on the farm in the winter of 2006-07, which was a very strange experience.
By June last year, we were able to raise the money for a mortgage again, and we now own a 17th century cottage just two minutes from the farm. Southern Water told us it was a lovely end to a lovely story - now it owns just the reservoir, while other organisations, such as the Woodland Trust, own other parts of the site.
We used to market our fruit into the supermarkets via a company called Congela, but it got bought out. Five or six years ago, Norman Collett approached us, and we have worked with them ever since. This season they did well by us and even helped with the fruit picking. We had a very good crop this season - fruit set in April was good, with some nice warm weather followed by rain, which helped swell the fruit up. We couldn’t have asked for more - we needed a big yield this year and we got one.
We tend to start picking on August 1 and then go through to the start of November. Collett’s holds the fruit in its storage facilities, but it cannot be kept for long because it is organic and cannot be sprayed. We require a professional marketing desk to pack and sell our fruit - although we know what we are doing, we simply don’t have the money to do it ourselves.
On the farm we have three individual orchards. We do all the work - in a short year there is only the two of us and one other picker. We grow Cox, Spartan, Bramley, Jonagold, Russet and Worcester, and last year also started trials of the Italian red variety, Modi. We have also conducted trials with Exosect’s Exosex mating confusion technology, which have so far been very successful.
Collett’s has told us it could sell the contents of Great Sanders Fruit Farm 10 times over, and more apple farmers in the UK are certainly starting to plant organic to meet demand, but we fear they might be disappointed. It is very hard to establish a young organic tree, and far easier to farm conventional. It takes a lot longer for organic trees to crop properly - with a conventional tree you should be able to break even after three years of planting, whereas with organic it can take as long as seven years.
We send apples to juicing and processing through other companies - only a small portion of our product actually goes to fresh. We grew 900 bins of fruit in 2007, and Collett’s only took 270 of those - but if I were a conventional grower, nearly all the fruit would go to fresh. People assume that because our fruit is organic we get better returns, but actually yields are smaller, so that is not the case. But we don’t regret anything we have done - we just feel really lucky to be doing what we love.
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