Certified Organic

New organic product certification rules in place to regulate the market By Wang Hairong

Certified Organic

New organic product certification rules in place to regulate the market By Wang Hairong

Neatly-packaged vegetables and fruits greet customers at the entrance of the Ganbei Supermarket in Beijing’s Xicheng District. The produce, usually sold in small plastic boxes, looks fresh and clean.Some boxes bear organic certification marks and some do not.

Hanging from the top of a shelf are the organic certi fi cates of a vegetable producer in Xiaotangshan in Beijing’s north suburb. The certi fi cates list the vegetable varieties certi fi ed and their planting acreage.

But Yan, a woman in her 70s, was too focused on inspecting the vegetables lying on the shelf to notice the three pages of paper above her head. She put a box of grape tomatoes and a box of green bean sprouts in her shopping basket.

Yan toldBeijing Reviewthat the products she brought from the stall in the past had been excellent. The woman was not aware of the new government regulation on organic produce certi fi cation, and she did not even know the producer of her choice is a governmentcerti fi ed organic producer.

The box of a dozen or so grape tomatoes,weighing about one third of 1 kg, was sold at a price of 10 yuan ($1.5), several times the price of regular grape tomatoes, and the bean sprout costs about 8 yuan ($1.2) per kg., almost double the price of regular bean sprouts. Yan said that while these vegetables were expensive, their quality and safety gave her peace of mind.

On top of a meat counter, a television shows several black pigs foraging in a green forest. That is the advertisement for Jingqishen Organic Agriculture Co. Ltd. The video emphasizes that the pigs are reared in a natural environment in the Changbai Mountains in northeast China, and that they are not fed antibiotics or toxic additives.

A middle-aged woman who selected a packet of pork said that she often ate black pig meat from this producer because she found the meat tastier. The price tag indicated that the meat was about twice as expensive as a similar nonorganic product.

ORGANIC FOOD: Certi ficates of organic producers are displayed above a vegetable shelf in the Ganbei Supermarket in Beijing

Over 15 minutes, fi ve customers put organic items into their shopping carts, including vegetables, pork and organic eggs. They all said that they chose the products because of the producers’ reputation, whereas none verified whether the products were certi fi ed organic.

Strict rules

In the past few years, food safety scandals have prompted more and more Chinese consumers to turn to organic products, which claim to be produced in a natural way, free of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemical additives.

China’s annual organic food consumption is predicted to reach 4.8 million tons in 2012, up 27.2 percent from the previous year, according to Beijing Huajing Zongheng Consulting Co. Ltd., a market research company. While initially Chinese organic producers were primarily export-oriented, today the country imports organic food in order to meet surging domestic demand.

But Zhou Zejiang, a researcher with the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences in east China’s Jiangsu Province, warned that China’s organic product market had been growing too fast to be effectively regulated.

“The market is currently chaotic with too many fake products,” Zhou said.

Zhou participated in drafting China’s latest regulation for certifying organic products.He believes the new regulation, which he said is one of the strictest certi fi cation standards in the world, will help clean up the sector after coming into force on March 1.

The new regulation defines the purpose and scope of certification, certification standards, certification procedures and required quali fi cations for certifying organizations and personnel.

The Certification and Accreditation Administration of China (CNCA) has also released the Organic Product Certification Directory, listing 37 categories of organic products including vegetables and milk. A national organic product certification logo database management system has been put into operation, so that any certified organic product can be traced to its origin.

Data from the CNCA show that as of the end of 2011, a total of 9,337 organic product certificates had been issued in China and 2 million hectares of farmland had been certifi ed for organic production.

Currently, 23 Chinese certi fi ers have been authorized to certify organic products for domestic consumption, whereas production for export is certi fi ed by foreign certi fi ers approved by China.

According to the CNCA, the new certification regulation differs from the previous one in that it has stricter certi fi cation standards on the production, processing, labeling and marketing of organic products. For instance, a certifying organization is required to conduct site inspections on all production activities at the organic production site in every production season for all products to be certi fi ed.

The new regulation also departs from the old one in spelling out that the certi fi cates of dishonest producers shall be revoked or suspended in the event that the quality of their products does not meet national standards or prohibited substances are detected, and a revoked certificate cannot be restored for any reason.

Post-certi fi cation administration is a focus of market regulation. A certifying organization is required to make at least one postcertification on-site inspection of a certified producer. The certi fi er can determine the frequency of on-site inspections according to the type and risks of certi fi ed products, the quality of the producer’s management system and the overall credibility of the locality.

Organic products are usually sold at prices much higher than regular items. This price difference offers an incentive for fraud.

Last October, investigations on fake organic products carried out by Xinhua News Agency reporters exposed misuse of certification marks in the Chinese market. Some producers use expired certification marks,some vendors label their non-organic products organic and some even use counterfeit organic certi fi cation marks. Liu Gang, an organic food broker who’s been trading, processing and packaging organic food in Beijing, Shandong and Guangxi for years, said that an organic product certificate could be bought for between 20,000 yuan ($3,171) and 30,000 yuan($4,756).

To make certi fi cation marks more dif fi cult to tamper with, the new government regulation specifies that every certification mark should have a unique code, which should be put on the smallest package of certi fi ed organic products, so that the product can be traced and verified. The code should consist of the information of the certifying organization, the certifying year and some random numbers.

The CNCA also periodically inspects the market to crack down on illegal use of certi fication marks for organic products. According to the CNCA, in 2011, it inspected 845 vending venues and 1,610 certi fi ed producers and investigated 69 cases involving counterfeit organic certi fi cation marks.

Small producers

Although the tight certi fi cation standards are intended to boost organic production, some argue the regulation will hinder small producers and prevent them from shifting to this green production model.

“The requirements in the new regulation for production environment, processes,material and scale are too strict for ordinary farmers, and the certification is also too expensive for them,” said Ren Yuanyong,Director of the Agricultural Technology Promotion Center in Dongxi Town, Jianyang City in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

Nonetheless, Zhou at the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences said that individual farmers can win consumers’ trust with their reputation and good will instead of certi fi cation.

Pan Jiaen, an executive at the Little Donkey Farm in Beijing, agreed with Zhou. Pan said as an organic producer, the Little Donkey Farm would not seek certification, because annual certification is too expensive for small producers, and many counterfeit certi fi ed products have undermined the credibility of certi fi cation.

Shi Yan, founder of the Little Donkey Farm, encourages consumers to fi rst visit her farm, to see the facilities and crops and to chat with local farmers about how it works.

Farmers at the Little Donkey Farm are required to follow the principles of organic farming, such as not using any synthetic fertilizer or pesticides. “Livestock should be fed with the farm’s own grass and vegetables and not commercially produced animal feed,” Shi said.