Session Information: Organic Textile Industry leaders meet to explore possibilities for developing tools for end-to-end traceability beyond farm.

Mildred Steidle, Organic Services, Gerald A. Herrmann, founding Managing Partner, Organic Services GmbH, Germany

Session Information:

Face the challenges of data management and documentation of (internal) audit and certification processes and discuss solutions.

Grower groups are organized smallholder producers. By banding together, smallholder farmers are able to increase their economic power, providing evidence of the old adage that “together, we are stronger”. In organizing, however, comes greater complexity. Implementing an Internal Control System (ICS) to fulfil organic or any another certification market standards, such as Fair Trade, UTZ or GLOBALG.A.P. and RSPO is a challenge. Data management and the documentation needed to fulfil compliance requirements can easily become overwhelming, especially as the number of members grows and when groups are certified to more than one standard, each of which has unique requirements.

Same applies to small, local certifiers who shall be able to perform equal to their globally active competitors. Meeting audit and reporting demands applied by accreditors can be a challenge. Therefore, CBs – large and small – need tools to professionally manage data and the documentation of their audit/ certification process from start to end in a transparent and efficient manner.

Topics of the workshop:

• The workshop aims to bring together representatives of smallholder groups, certifiers, traders as well as representatives of regulatory bodies.
• Workshop participants are invited to discuss key challenges of implementing an ICS in Grower Groups as well as the problems small, local certifiers are facing.
• Participants are invited to learn about two unique integrity tools tailor made for meeting the challenges:
  • Group Integrity for Grower Groups; www.group-integrity.com
  • Ecert Basic for small, local certifiers; www.ecert-basic.com

David Gould, IFOAM Innovation Committee

Session Information:

Promoting, and fostering a culture of innovation is an integral feature of Organic 3.0. As the Organic 3.0 document states, “…innovation committees explore potentials and develop positions on the use of upcoming technologies. The innovation committees assure a fast uptake of potentials, but they also carefully assess the risks and act timely to exclude technologies that are not in line with organic principles. Innovation committees get the same type of importance as standards committees in Organic 2.0…”

In the second half of 2016 IFOAM – Organics International established and launched its first Innovation Committee. By the time of the Organic World Congress in India, the Committee will have completed its first year of activities.

The aims of this workshop are to share experiences and insights about what a “culture of innovation” means – including networking, inspiring, and envisioning how innovators and which kinds of innovations can best serve the organic sector and contribute to its own improvement as well as contributing to global challenges.

Indicative topics for a 45- minutes session

• The Innovation Committee of IFOAM – Organics International – activities and experiences
• Top priorities for innovations needed across the organic sector
• Fostering a culture of innovation
• Localized mechanisms for innovations, with a focus on smallholders
• Including promising innovations into global, regional, and local policies

Session Information: The winners of the Grand Prize and Science Prize of the 3rd Organic Farming Innovation Award present their innovations and answer questions. The public announcement of the awards and the award ceremony will be during the mid conference plenary in the same morning, from 09:00-09:15.

Session Information: CEOs meet to develop strategies for defining dedicated organic value chain and strategies need for inter-linkages with producers.

Michael Sligh, RAFI

Session Information:

This talk will discuss the many challenges facing organic from GMO contamination in organic supply chains and layout concrete solutions for taking action.

It is vital to view and frame this from the much bigger picture within which the organic supply chain challenges are embedded, if we are to develop and implement strategies that can effectively prevent, reduce, and remedy GMO contamination.

Today, virtually all commodities with GMO counterparts - such as cotton, corn, soy, alfalfa, sugar beets, canola, rice and papaya - are experiencing GMO contamination to varying degrees depending on the individual GMO commodity’s rates of adoption, means of pollination, and geographical spread.

This talk will also discuss some of the key challenges of GMO technology, including the promiscuity of the technology, role of patents, impacts on loss of farmers rights to save seeds, testing conundrums, and seed industry consolidation.

As well as, some of the key concurrent global trends and drivers causing the GMO contamination accelerate, such as - decline in agro-biodiversity, decline in capacity of public plant breeding support, climate change, lack of GMO regulatory and legal oversight and accountability, and lack of independent scientific assessment prior to commercialization.

It will conclude with discussion of key solutions, such as;

• Greater protections for our shared biodiversity,
• Shifting the liability back to the patent-holders and specifically establishing protocols to address GMO liability and trespass.
• Greater parity and fair share of public and plant breeding private investments to catch-up and stay ahead of organic demand. We must build the seed supply systems that we need and not be so dependent on the consolidated conventional system.
• Education and advocacy. The organic sector also must now take a stand opposing the use of such restrictive utility-type patents and agreements in organic seed production system to ensure that we are protecting and creating sane alternatives for farmer and breeder access to seed improvements into the future.
• Prevention and due diligence – we can and must do more to avoid GMO contamination.

Dr. Alexander Gerber & Steffen Reese, Demeter International & Naturland

Session Information:
The market’s current push toward higher levels of social equity in organic value chains will be discussed. Both associations will share their experiences with concepts such as fair trade, the promotion of social responsibility towards employees in organic production and the effort to guarantee these values through certification and communicate them through labelling or product branding.

Session Information: Small market initiatives and on-line business initiatives as new opportunities for low cost supply chain for organic.

Jocelyn Parot, URGENCI

Session Information:

What have been the latest developments on both sides ? If direct sales farms don't need certification, then how is community organising up to the job of providing a reliable organic guarantee?

Speakers : Eva Torremocha, PGS Committee, IFOAM, Spain/France; Wallapa von Willenswaard, Towards Organic Asia, Thailand; Joy Daniel, Indian Institute Rural Development, India; Noémie Labrosse, Equiterre, Canada.

Around the globe, organic farmers and support organizations of varying kinds have been developing alternative certification programs, c a l l e d Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS), that are better suited to small, direct-sales farms. While each program is unique and specific to its social context, they all have core principles based on sustainable, ecological practices, social justice, equity and gender balance.

The touchstone for the organic guarantee is farmer integrity and trust between farmers and their customers. PGS share these goals: to empower even the poorest and smallest-scale farmers to become active contributors to and beneficiaries of local sustainable development and to offer continuous education to farmers and other stakeholders in the system.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a connection between a nearby farmer and the people who eat the food that the farmer produces, summed up as “food producers + food consumers + commitment to one another = CSAs + untold possibilities.” In CSA, the consumers have a trust relationship with the farmers and sometimes even cooperate in the planning and marketing of the produce. CSAs work well where there is proximity between the farmers and consumers and when both are able to commit their time, resources and efforts to support one another.

Thus, PGS and CSA are similar in their overall objectives of improved livelihoods of organic farmers and increased access to safe food. There are possibilities to appropriately combine the principles of PGS to bring together the stakeholders of farming projects and the CSA approach of a close relationship between consumers and producers. This could help farmers and consumers to build on the opportunities presented by the CSA and PGS to better achieve the objectives.

Both PGS and CSA enhance transparent and shared decision-making processes and aim to share the responsibility for supporting sustainable agriculture practices. As such, it is essential to recognise these efforts to guarantee fair and organic standards by the very farmers and consumers it serves, encouraging and sometimes requiring direct participation of farmers and consumers. These peer-based solidarity procedures establish trust, empower farmers, provide education for farmers and non-farmers, improve local marketing networks and set the conditions for fair trade while providing a credible organic guarantee.

This 90-minute-workshop will offer an encounter between two movements that have been developing in parallel rather than jointly and have a lot to learn from each other. We will ask the speakers to underline the lessons learned from the PGS experience in order to see how PGS could be beneficially applied to CSA.

Christian Andres, FiBL, TIPI of IFOAM - Organics International

Session Information:

Organic food and farming systems (OFFS) have great potential to meet global challenges – such as population growth, climate change, environmental pollution and deterioration of natural resources – while being economically attractive to farmers. However, OFFS remain a niche category with less than one percent of the global farmland certified, and only a small share of the global population consuming organic produce. Today, many research institutes and scientists in low- and middle-income countries working on novel knowledge and techniques of organic systems are facing challenges, and more resource allocation to these areas is needed. Furthermore, OFFS are not considered in the context of international research for development, and there is a growing disparity between smallholder/family farms and industrialised production within OFFS.

Objectives

In order to improve access to funding for research on OFFS at domestic and international levels, it is of utmost importance to have a strategic research agenda which is accepted across the organic community, and can later be translated into an implementation action plan. Building on the vision and strategic action plan of TIPI (the Technology Innovation Platform of IFOAM – Organics International) and a workshop on the same topic to be held at BIOFACH 2017 earlier in 2017, the workshop presents preliminary results of the work-in-progress about the development of such a strategic research agenda, and asks for feedback from the global organic movement. Furthermore, it addressed the following questions:

- What scientific evidence and lobbying effort is needed to persuade decision makers that OFFS is able to meet global challenges and to serve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)?

- How can the organic community and its constituents become better organised as effective advocates for OFFS research? Format

This workshop will be organized as a 90 minutes event with input lectures from speakers representing the organic community. These talks will be followed by a workshop dedicated to the title of the event.

List of speakers

- Urs Niggli, Director & President, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) & Technology Innovation Platform of IFOAM – Organics International (TIPI)

- Christian Andres, Research Scientist & Coordinator, FiBL & TIPI

Richard Petrasek, FiBL Austria, Julia Lernoud, FiBL, Anja Vieweger, Organic Research Centre, Daniel Bartschi, Bio Suisse

Session Information:

Organic farming is a pioneer for sustainable agriculture. Organic food and agriculture systems positively impact biodiversity, animal welfare, soil fertility etc. and can significantly contribute to addressing the global challenges described in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, there is raising criticisms in trade, politics and science, questioning the excellence of organic farming systems. For instance, organic farms sometimes performs even worse in life cycle assessments. Organic farming associations, traders and processors are particularly in competition with other private standards, which communicate individual sustainability services such as biodiversity to consumers, to promote the sales of certified products. Global frameworks like the “Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems” (SAFA) – sustainability guidelines published in 2013 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) can help to structure assessments aiming to better understand strength and weaknesses of organic and non-organic farms. Another framework released by the United Nations in 2015 are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), officially known as “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” is a set of seventeen "Global Goals" with 169 targets. However, there is no method developed yet to operationalize the goals in an assessment procedure for farms. Against this background, the organic sector lacks methods to survey the sustainability performance for a large number of farms. Innovative methods are needed to measure impacts of different practices based on scientific assessments that are part of ongoing, transparent study and refinement. This approach is fully in line with the ORGANIC 3.0 strategy and supported by the organic sector.

Objectives of the Workshop

Aiming to further develop the organic sector and to generate facts on how organic farms contribute to the SDGs it is of utmost importance to further develop existing approaches. The workshop introduces the “Sustainability and Monitoring RouTine” (SMART), a multi-criteria assessment method that is operationalizing the global applicable SAFA Guidelines. Based on results of SMART applications, the potential of the method for future assessments of the SDGs is illustrated to the audience. A selection of those SDGs that are not yet or only partly covered in SMART will be presented in detail to the audience to reflect and asks for feedback from the global organic research community aiming to address the following questions:
- How are the SDGs structured and defined? Why are they relevant for the organic sector?
- How can sustainability of organic farming be assessed holistically based on the SAFA Guidelines and the SDGs?
- What are "hot spots" and relevant topics in organic farming for selected SDG targets (that are not yet / or only partially covered in SMART)

Format

90 minutes workshop starting with a short input from an expert in sustainability assessment. Following the introductory speech the participants will split up into groups to identify hot-spots, relevant topics to be assessed for a number of preselected SDGs. Based on the results of this participatory data collection the participants will get the opportunity to be involved in the follow-up development of indicators.

Dr. Julia Wright, Coventry University

Session Information:
Organised by Dr Julia Wright and PhD Candidate Janus Bojesen Jensen, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University UK.

Organic farming already meets multiple sustainability goals, and factors limiting its mainstreaming are arguably socio-political rather than technical. So what is the next step for organic farming practice? To date, the science of both organic and industrial agriculture have been based on the physical, particle-matter approach within the disciplines of chemistry and biology. Yet this worldview - that focuses on the physical and avoids the non-physical - is only 300 years old and is linked to the age of rationalism and the suppression of the feminine. From Einstein onwards, quantum science has been based on the concept of wave-particle duality, meaning that matter operates as both a wave and a particle and that we need to understand both. If organic farming is holistic, and if it truly respects nature, then wave theory should be addressed.

The implications are enormous, not only because sound waves as well as electromagnetic waves are showing to influence plant and animal growth and health, but also because this science may be able to validate existing indigenous, spiritual and sacred practices from around the world as well as certain biodynamic practices. Such practices include, chanting, prayer, ritual, cosmological influences, and nature communication.

This Workshop aims to raise this issue for discussion. It will commence by providing an overview of the topic and of current research and development activities of the new research programme Quantum Thinking for Agrocology at Coventry University and of other researchers and practitioners. After this, structured plenary and small-group discussions will share knowledge and experiences of existing practices, and of any challenges encountered. The workshop will conclude by identifying 3 key actions that will be taken forward, and will include opportunity for participants to register for longer term collaboration.