> > Surely you're aware of a regulatory definition with some more
> > complicated reasoning than that behind it?
> >
> > --
> > Andy
>
> Yes "organic" foods are certified as such because they lack
> pesticides or whatever, but the moniker is still annoying in that my
> non "organic" broccoli is still very organic, even with the tasty
> pesticide residues, as "organic" broccoli.
>
> Sheldon
>
Yeah, but its no more annoying than the use of "natural," or "new and improved" or "you fill in the marketing blank." I don't think this gets it quite right but there's a good bit of this kind of work in agrifood studies in sociology and geography: Corporate cooptation of organic and fair trade standards
Ag and Human Values, July 2009
Daniel Jaffee (Washington State) and Philip H. Howard(Michigan State) **** Abstract Recent years have seen a substantial increase in alternative agrifood initiatives that attempt to use the market to curtail the negative social and environmental effects of production and trade in a globalized food system. These alternatives pose a challenge to capital accumulation and the externalization of environmental costs by large agribusiness, trading and retail firms. Yet the success of these alternatives also makes them an inviting target for corporate participation. This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the two most significant such food system alternatives—organics and fair trade—focusing on corporate involvement in establishing and renegotiating the standards undergirding these initiatives. We compare the development of and contestation over the standards for both certified organic and certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. We provide a brief history of their parallel processes of rapid growth and market mainstreaming. We examine claims of cooptation by movement participants, as well as the divergences and similarities between the organic and fair trade cases. Analyzing these two cases provides useful insights into the strategic approaches that corporate firms have deployed to further capital accumulation and to defuse threats to their profit margins and to status quo production, pricing, labor, trading and retailing practices. It can also offer valuable lessons regarding the most effective means of responding to such counter-reforms and of protecting or reasserting the more transformative elements at the heart of these alternative systems.