Say you are a small farmer with a descent sized plot of about 11 football fields, just under 20 acres. With that, you and your family are trying to achieve self sufficiency. When you have a little surplus left over, you may sell that at the local farmers market. You mainly have land for some livestock here and there and a couple thousand bushels of crop yield. When you head to the farmers market you can’t however call your vegetables or produce organic. To do so, you would definitely be breaking the law or at least deceiving your customers. One has to get certified by regulatory body and that process is a long tortured bureaucratic one.
As I write this, I have next to me the IOAS fee catalogue, which stands for the International Organic Accreditation Service, for 2009. These are the guys who certify the certifiers and are under the IFOAM, which is the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. Yes I know, there are 20 levels to this. So the IOAS, the certifiers of the certifiers charges about $ 5,000 just for the application fee. Once they have returned your application, you have to add another $500 for the screening fee, though, mind you, they haven’t even come to your plot yet for evaluation.
So after waiting a while, minimum just about three months or so, they send you an appointment and an estimation of the evaluation fee. I guess they can determine this from the size of your planned accrediting programmes. So lets say it takes about 5 days, that’s another $3,000 you have to hand in to the IOAS. They charge $600 a day. I know, all these sums are a bit of a bore, but so far we’re closing in on $10,000, excluding the preparation work the accreditee had to do for the evaluation.
Of course there’s an additional annual fee of $3,000 and they want close to 1% of your sales of your first 1.4 million. No small endeavor will ever surpass that sum. We have not even mentioned the surveillance travel fee that you have to pay to these guys. Remember, the IOAS are charging the certifiers who in turn must charge the farmers in order to make their own profit. As with anything that is centrally regulated, its bound to be bureaucratic, slow and, in regards to the fees, just plain theft.
Illustration: Trevor Manternach