farmers, especially in the global south, where third-party certification usually costs more than their annual income.
The world’s largest organic markets, the EU and the US prohibit PGS and make it illegal for these producers to call their products, such as coffee, tea, vanilla, and cocoa, organic. At the same time, large industrial-scale corporate organic farms can access these markets because they have the economies of scale to afford third-party certification. This is grossly unfair to some of the poorest farmers on the planet.
The exodus of family farms from organic certification, combined with the reluctance of many farmers to be certified organic, has meant they must find another way to label their produce. Many farmers now market their produce using terms like regenerative and agroecological.
Certification systems must be reformed if the organic sector wants to engage these family farmers and avoid being dominated by industrial organic corporations. They need to be simpler, cheaper, and fairer. Group certification systems, especially PGS, are some of the best options to do this.
We must take back standards and certification from governments and agribusiness and have control over them. We must build a new, more significant movement that combines like-minded systems such as Agroecology, Organic Agriculture, and Regenerative Agriculture as the natural alternative to degenerative industrial agriculture.
Regeneration International believes that all agricultural systems should be regenerative, organic, and based on the science of agroecology. We are developing AROES (Agroecological Regenerative Organic Ecosystem Services) as a project that uses organic certification to our AROES standard, which is fit for purpose. Ronnie Cummins and I put a lot of time into this concept.
A significant difference is that we will be paying farmers to be certified. I have spent a lot of time road-testing AROES by giving presentations about this to numerous farmers on every continent. Most stated they would not pay for organic certification. However, when I asked them if we paid them for ecosystem services, they said they were prepared to be certified.
Our AROES standard and certification system will be genuinely regenerative, regenerating the climate, agroecosystems, and communities. In future articles, we will expand on this and explain how it works.