Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Europe, Headlines, Health

HEALTH: Look Before Buying ‘Organic’, Whatever That Means

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jul 19 2004 (IPS) - Eating healthy is coming to mean buying organic. Or “bio”, “pure”, “natural”. But what do these words say about the produce they sit on?

“Nothing very much,” Marco Presutto from Consumers International told IPS. “Or even worse, they can actually be quite misleading.”

A study by Consumers International along with leading consumer groups in eight countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Romania, Slovenia and the United States) threw up the following examples:

– Tuna: Up to six different logos and wording were found on 25 tins of tuna claiming that tuna was fished without harming dolphins. Terms used included ‘dolphin friendly’, ‘dolphin safe’, ‘no threat to dolphin species’ and ‘certified fishing, drift net free’. There was no assurance or verification to back up any of these claims.

– Eggs: The 17 samples surveyed came up with six different types of claims relating to animal welfare, such as ‘free range’ and ‘free running’. The claims could not be verified and were sometimes contradicted by other labelling information.

– Bio: This widely used term means different things in different countries and languages. It is mainly used on organic foods but also on dairy products such as Bio yoghurts that are not organically certified.

“And the label ‘natural’ is used for just about anything,” Presutto said. “Every producer uses it, but there is no standard definition of what it can mean.” The label “pure” is commonly used on orange juice made from concentrate when the word would suggest something straight from an orange.

“There is no agreement what ‘fresh’ might mean,” he said. “To some fresh eggs are those that come straight from a hen. To another they are fresh if they are a week old.”

The Consumers International report says that the “self-declared green claims on selected food products shows there is a need for clear labelling and verified claims, to enable consumers to distinguish between real claims and marketing ploys.”

The consumer organisations who conducted the survey purchased a list of basic foods typical of a family’s weekly shopping basket. “They were then checked and evaluated against the relevant national and international regulations,” the report says.

“The survey discovered a proliferation of green and ‘eco’ claims on different foods. Many of the claims were unverified, confusing and/or misleading.”

Declarations of organic products often appear without a back-up certification number, Presutto said. “And a lot of producers seem to mean different things when they say ‘organic’.”

The International Federation for Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) is working to standardise the quality and labelling of foods marked as organic.

“But there is a problem because many of the governments do not recognise the certification of one another,” Bernward Geier from the IFOAM head office in Bonn told IPS. “You have about 60 governments engaged in regulations on organic certification and so there is some confusion on the regulatory side.”

But the certification privately offered by IFOAM covers about two-thirds of organic produce traded worldwide, Geier said. It has about 750 member organisations in more than 100 countries and is actively involved now in pushing for a move towards standardisation.

The European Union (EU) has its own system of certification in place. “But it is not very widely used and it is not well known,” Irina Danada from Consumers International told IPS. “People are more familiar with national certification schemes.”

But with a lot of produce traded across countries, someone in Norway may not know a Danish label. There are also a lot of “copycat labels” around and one result is that people are losing trust in organic labelling,” Danada said.

The Consumers International report includes 12 recommendations to support consumer rights. The primary recommendation is that “self-declared claims on food labels should be clear and unambiguous – where they are not, enforcement action should be undertaken to ensure that they are.”