Are organic agricultural product prices high? Is the certification reliable?

Author: Guo Huanren (Professor, Department of Agronomy, National Taiwan University, Taiwan, China)

Is organic agricultural product certification really reliable? Many organic farmers grow crops without organic certification, so how should consumers choose? Can I trust what the producers say?

In a commercial society, no system can offer a 100 percent guarantee, but without a system everything would fall into chaos. Under current regulations, agricultural product operators may not sell their agricultural products or processed goods under the name "organic" without verification and labeling. However, truly organic products fall into two major categories. The first is organic products that have been verified and carry a qualified label; the second is products bought from reputable farming friends or farms that are not nominally called "organic" but do in fact conform to the principles of organic farming methods.

Qualified labeled organic products can be seen directly in hypermarkets, organic stores, and markets. Because consumers at these places do not come into contact with organic farmers, they need to look for verification labels to ensure they are buying genuinely organic products. The current verification methods may not yet be very complete, but according to the results of government random testing for pesticide residues, the rate of non-compliance is quite low, indicating that verification is fairly reliable.

Quite a few farmers practice various kinds of organic farming methods but have not applied for verification. These farms use no chemical fertilizers and no pesticides, so although their products cannot be sold under the name "organic," they still provide safe agricultural products. Consumers would do best to interact with the farm owners and occasionally visit these farms to judge for themselves whether the farm has used chemical fertilizers and pesticides. On farmland where no chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used, the soil is usually softer, earthworms and other animals can be seen in the soil, and there are more kinds of weeds on the farmland.

Organic agricultural products cost several times more than those from conventional farming. Why? Is it possible to lower the price?

At present, organic agricultural products are indeed sold at a higher price than conventional agricultural products. The main reason is that organic farming methods rely more on human labor, so costs are higher; second, organic farming methods often produce lower yields, so organic farmers need to raise prices to obtain a reasonable cost-benefit ratio. By contrast, consumers who buy organic products at a slightly higher price can get food they feel more reassured about and can also contribute to the environment.

Another reason conventional agricultural products have lower costs is that government policy has long supported chemical agriculture. For example, in order to "take care of" farmers, the government uses price subsidies to keep chemical fertilizer prices down. If government funding could also shift direction and encourage farmers to make or buy organic fertilizer themselves, while letting chemical fertilizer prices move with market prices, then the production costs of the two farming methods would draw closer together, and the selling price of organic agricultural products could be expected to fall.