Organic Certification – can we trust it in India?
This is the oldest question in organic retail and has to do with a country like India adopting an unnecessarily process oriented certification industry which is both culturally and operationally misfit for our context for the following reasons:
- Organic farming certification does not guarantee anything, nor does it have a penalizing regulatory power for violation
- While the consumer has been made to believe that certification is a way of validation, most of them seriously don’t trust it completely, nor are they willing to pay even part of the certification fees
- Most of India does not have easy to test labs with which the claims can be put to test, so the onus remains with the retailer / producer and it will take an exceptional customer to take the trouble to test; nor has the regulatory agency worked out a mechanism to periodically test and be transparent about the process and also the outcomes
- Like every regulatory system in India, this too can have corruption, nepotism, favouritism, exclusivity and privileged control
So, what is the solution? – one may ask.
For me the solution is the emergence of local markets and strong local economies. Unless we have locally strong consumer – producer relationships emerge, we will continue to struggle with the trust deficit and unreliable system of certification, which I am sure will whither away soon enough in India.
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