So when's Wal-Mart going to join the rush? This is from an article in the Wall Street Journal:

In a bid to capture a slice of the fast-growing organic-foods market, mainstream supermarket chains are rushing out their own store-brand lines that can cost significantly less than comparable specialty brands often found at health-food and gourmet stores. The pricing could remove a big barrier for many Americans who have wanted to try organic rice, cookies or cans of soup but have been put off by the prices. Though the store brands are less expensive, the chains say they adhere to the same federal standards for what constitutes organic as other brands.

SuperValu Inc., poised to become the nation's second-largest supermarket chain after it acquires Albertson's Inc., this month is introducing a line of 50 organic products called Nature's Best, including cereal, juice, apple sauce and pasta. By the end of June, the company will add 100 more private-label organic products, and plans to offer about 300 by mid-2007.

Check out Vanadana Shiva's article about India's Proposed Food Safety & Standards Bill. One excerpt:

While food hazards grow, food safety laws are being shaped which deregulate large corporations and over-regulate the small scale self organized economy. Such industrial food safety standards promote large scale globalised production, and act against local foods. These laws are also the basis of the Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary Agreement of WTO.

Shiva is one of the best critics of the WTO and this article is a case in point. However, in focusing on the WTO, she overlooks corporate para-state institutions like EurepGAP, which actually bypass the WTO by one-upping it on free market rhetoric by suggesting that their policies merely reflect the demands of its ("sovereign"?) consumer base.

According to the Business Standard entitled `EU standards bleed Indian traders':

In some cases, the cost of complying with the EU standards [i.e. EurepGAP] is as high as 65 per cent of the production cost of the goods, with the high cost of EU compliance certificates and the lack of availability of certifying agencies in the country making exporting to the EU difficult, the survey said.

Note that even though Eurep, which operates EurepGAP, is a consortium of entirely private firms, this article in the Business Standard basically equates exporting to EurepGAP to exporting to the EU.

Shelf space at supermarkets is one of the most valuable and therefore contested forms of real estate square footage in the world. That's one reason why food processers, united in the US as the Grocery Manufacturers Association, sponsor anti-democratic bills like the one that passed 283-139 in the US House to override state and local food-label laws.

It seems like whenever citizens and consumers express desires that go against the will of supermarkets and agribusiness, they respond with calls for "science-based" regulation, as if a) the GMA suddenly represents Science, and b) citizenry and consumers are the last to know what is good for them.

Their ultimate goal? Uniformity for food. Sounds awful. Who comes up with this stuff?

I just came across this 2004 article by Wendy Johnson about the standards for cherry production in British Colombia.

What is surprising to me is not only that industrialized fruit farms in the South are adapting more quickly to new standards than their Canadian counterparts, but also that on some of the farms in Chile and Argentina each field "grows for a specified country and follows its particular maximum residue levels designations".

The conclusion?

It is hard to argue with a system that puts the quality of food first, but there is the nagging suspicion this will spell the end of some family farms. This industry-changing event is just a sign of things to come.

I went to see a showing of Ceský sen (Czech Dream). There's so much to say, both good and bad, about this film. But i'll make this brief.

First, it's clear to me that state-funded filmmakers in the Czech Republic have way less rigorous ethics standards than any North American social science department. In order to make their statement, the two gonzos behind this film tricked thousands of (mostly poor) consumers, all seeking the consumer paradise that's supposed to be found at the end of the EU rainbow, to show up to the opening of their nonexistent big-box supermarket called "Czech Dream" (a would-be competitor to the UK supermarket Tesco that is rapidly coming to dominate European retailing).

The filmmakers' condescending attitude towards the consumer hordes seemed to get transferred to the liberal Madison audience with whom i was sitting. Just as 20 years ago tourists in Prague would snap photos of Czechs lining up to buy bananas (a vignette that is retold by one of Ceský sen's disappointed would-be customers), here were 1000 film-goers getting entertainment value from watching people of a different nationality ache longingly for cheap mineral water and other things we take for granted.

Review of: Jason Konefal, Michael Mascarenhas, and Maki Hatanaka (2005) "Governance in the global agro-food system: Backlighting the role of transnational supermarket chains" Agriculture and Human Values 22: 291–302.

Reviewer: kjmcw

Some of the liveliness of contemporary democracy is to be found away from the polling booths, where one often looks for it in vain, in the less examined machinery of science and technology policy-that is, in technical advisory committees, court proceedings, regulatory assessments, scientific controversies, and even the ephemeral web pages of environ-mental groups and multinational corporations. (Jasanoff 2005: 9)

The authors of "Governance in the global agro-food system: Backlighting the role of transnational supermarket chains" to a certain degree echo Jasanoff#039s argument above that science and technology policy is an increasingly important nexus of conflict and debate about all aspects of public life. However, while Jasanoff apparently sees hope, "liveliness", and opportunities for greater democratic participation, Konefal et al. are less optimistic, and perceive an opaque realm of "backstage" deal making by technocrats from the highest echelons of supermarket firms.

Kenyan newspaper The Standard is reporting about changes to the export market for cut flowers. 

The small-scale farmers have been unable to meet the high cost of certification required by foreign certifying bodies. "This is why the Government through financial support from the development partners are developing a programme to keep the small scale farmers afloat," said Muriithi. The small-scale farmers, who accounted for more than half of Kenya’s flowers export market a decade ago, now supply less than ten per cent of the total export volumes.

What's interesting is that this is a public body in Kenya dealing with a private body in Europe (Eurepgap).

Caspian (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasian and Numbering), an American privacy advocacy group, is taking issue with Tesco, the UK's largest Supermarket chain, over their trials of RFID tagging on individual food items, as opposed to just the cases involved in shipping. Wal-mart, who pioneered the retail sector's mass adoption of RFID tags, has also been criticized for this.Here's the article

While i don't think that gleaning information from consumers is the primary purpose for RFID tags, it certainly represents a major threat, and once instituted, represents a major technological wedge that could help ratchet down privacy laws. It would be a truly golden opportunity for many a market research firm. Here's an article by Katherine Albrecht, the founder of Caspian, about the imminent use of RFID in supermarkets, in the context of other supermarket information gleaning technologies. The privacy advocacy groups, such as Caspian, also represent a potential ally against the dark lords of transnational commodity chain governance.

Nobody quoted in this article seems to have a problem with the tremendous power Wal-Mart will have over farmers in expanding into the organics industry. Is public cynism so profound as to overlook such devastating consequences for farmer autonomy if Wal-Mart dictates the terms of food production? Is the desire for organic food so strong that we should be meant to overlook the social consequences? What about the tension between the ecological benefits of organics versus the industrial-model production that Wal-Mart demands All of this is rather generic, obvious critique of Wal-Mart's move. The interesting thing to note about this article is the way "sustainability" is defined as a corporate ethos and the way corporations are depicted as frontline workers in this battle. Perhaps there could be some positive unintended consequences of this Wal-Mart attack in terms of subsidizing the transition to organic for some farmers... Or introducing people to organic food who would otherwise have no access, or can't afford it. But then again, Wal-Mart is a powerful force that will fast emerge as just another Invisible Giant.

Wal-Mart's move to organics could shake up retail world, analysts say

It's a real tragedy that the brightest minds in animation and video production technology work for marketing departments. Eurepgap's new "motivator" video, shown at their conference in Paris October 17-19, is a case in point. Are you ready to be un-impressed?

Includes awkward interventions from technocrats of Europgap, and delegates from McDonald's, Sainsbury's, Tesco, etc. Also contains a brief but flashy history of EurepGAP since 1999, which begins with Christian Moeller, the secretary of EurepGAP, reading this bizarre introduction off a teleprompter: "I would like to invite you now ... on a short journey... on (sic) our milestones, and values, and find out how you can benefit and share our common vision ... the vision of Eurepgap: global partnership for safe and sustainable agriculture."