Not too long ago, I spoke to an auditor for organic farming. He told me the story of one of his organic produce audits in a remote area of China. He asked the farmer: “How long has organic farming been practiced here?” The farmer responded: “I don’t remember exactly, it’s either 2000 or 3000 years”.
Surely a nice story to tell, and maybe that is still the case in some remote regions in China. But with the higher demands for organic produce, there are more and more agricultural goods coming from China claiming to have been grown organically.
And there is certainly an incentive to produce organically: according to a USDA report from August 2010, 500 g of conventional Red Cabbage cost the equivalent of $0.30 (USD), while the same, but organically-grown product, was priced at $1.40. In 2011, USDA already issued a warning about potential fraudulent labelling of conventional products coming from China as organic. In May 2017, the Washington Post reported that “massive imports of corn and soybeans” were incorrectly labelled as organic, but pesticide residues were found.
In December 2018, FoodLawLatest reported on the European Commission Audit for organic production and labelling in Belgium, which found that “the control system for organic production in Belgium is only partially in place. There is no competent authority responsible for import controls of organic goods, and market controls only cover follow up of complaints and control bodies are not annually supervised by all regional competent authorities.” A poor mark for the authorities!
Now, since the beginning of this year, and until the end of it, the European Commission has placed Chinese products labelled organic under special surveillance, according to the “Guidelines on additional official controls on products originating from China” from DG AGRI. The Guideline focuses on a range of products, for example:
- Cereals
- Milling products like malts and starches
- Oil seeds, Oil cake
- Goji berries
The surveillance includes also consignments arriving from China at the EU border via a third country, as this is a popular way of avoiding these stringent controls.
Notifications of mislabeled products can, as always, be found in the RASFF Alerts, and we’ll keep an eye out for it.
