Tim's Blog

I have recently returned from a meeting of the committee of Standards Australia that overviews the Australian Standard for Organic and Biodynamic Products.

High level meetings of this nature always produce intense sentiment and dissent. Of course they do. At this forum we are dealing with the fine detail of our Standard, what we call organic and what we will exclude. Most of these issues will not be of supreme interest to the average consumer. Consumers will want to know only that there is an appropriate and considered process for arriving at consensus on important issues. Most industry participants are very happy to have such a thorough and soundly based process in place to be a forum for broad input. Most are also aware that disagreement is a reality of any standards setting process is that the diversity of opinions offered and debated is a sign of the health of the industry and long journey we embark upon to create and maintain a standard.

The AS6000 can be held up as an excellent standard on the world stage. It has yet to be tested (being very new) but it appears to most industry commentators to be a basis for establishing equivalence with any other existing standard including the CODEX (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), IFOAM and individual country standards.

The highly respected processes of Standards Australia have been complete, with a number of expert industry subcommittees and wide distribution through the organic industry, primarily led by the OFA and the various certification bodies. The Committee is the largest ever established by Standards Australia (SA). There were more responses to the period of public consultation than received in any other SA process.

It is therefore very disappointing to find that some members of subcommittees or working groups, selected for their technical expertise, are unable to accept the decisions of the main committee when the decision is at variance from the technical viewpoint. It is vital to consult industry experts and to consider their input but, in the end, technical information can also be disputed, informed as it is from different academic perspectives, and the technical viewpoint needs to be balanced against a broader range of views, including practical production experiences but also the expectations of consumers and a comparative analysis of the AS6000 against the other various standards on which world trade is based.

How disappointing then that a technical expert, who participated in a working group of the standard, is now unable to accept any decision that is at variance with their opinion. So unable are they to accept that these decisions are based on a very wide range of inputs from a broadly constituted committee representing the interests of all stakeholders including consumers, that they are threatening legal action.

Importantly discussion at the working party was open and frank. The objector spoke as much or more than any other participant.

The responsibility of SA Committees is to take into account the full range of views. The critical issue for most of us is what will protect the reputation of organic as the most environmentally friendly, socially responsible and humane production system, and especially, what do consumers expect from an organic standard.

Threats of legal action are incompatible with an open, frank and democratic process. If someone feels so strongly that they must threaten legal action, the appropriate process is to first remove themselves from the subcommittee. It is offensive to other open-minded, well-intentioned participants in this process to infer that the subcommittees are improperly constituted, when the objectors were leading contributors to the activities and discussion of the committee.