While working as an independent organic food inspector, Mischa Popoff says he felt like "a police officer without a billy club or handcuffs." When he found four jugs of herbicide -- each containing four litres of prohibited spray -- inside one organic farmer's garage, Popoff ordered crop sampling be done at a lab. But that never happened because, he was told by the certifying body that hired him, "it's too expensive to run tests," Popoff recalls. When he asked a pig producer who also grows certified organic produce to prove that he wasn't putting liquid hog manure on those fields, which is often forbidden under organic guidelines, the farmer couldn't, and the matter ended there.
Popoff, who inspected more than 500 farms in North America over five years before he left the industry in 2003, says that he's suspected 16 instances of negligence and fraud by farmers who were nevertheless certified organic; he is sure of about at least five of those cases. "There's never one rat. There's always more in the wall," says Popoff, who was designated an advance process auditor by the Independent Organic Inspectors Association, and is now a certification consultant. "I don't want to say 50 per cent of farmers are cheating. But I also don't want to say five out of 500 is okay. I can't live with that."
This article in Macleans gets behind the issue of regulation as a process. It makes it clear to me that regulating is really a game that is gamed. We are naive to accept regulation in any field.
Regulation also favors the industrial over the small as it tends to drive so much cost. Health regulation for food actually drives out small and healthy producers. Here is Chef Michael Smith on this:
For chef Smith, who advocates for community-supported agriculture initiatives such as buying weekly field boxes from local farmers, deficiencies in the organic certification process today come as no surprise. "I've been hearing this for years," Smith says. "I can't tell you how many farmers I know who say, 'Why bother [getting certified]? It's a contradictory morass of regulations that gets in the way of me actually doing anything.' "
In a year and a half, however, organic farmers will have no choice if they want to sell outside their province. Smith says that while he is concerned about dubious claims, he supports organic production. Even Popoff recommends buying organic; the only problem, he says, will be "finding food that really is organic."
What does work is where Trust is made personal and we know who we are dealing with. With modern technology, it is possible, as we see with eBay, to have large systems based on personal trust.
We can do this - we can set up a system where those who are in it - like eBay have an interest in building Trust. It is cheap and it favours the good
