Environmental certifications: What are they good for?

I'm in the San Francisco Area for Spring Break, looking for jobs, interviewing, and visiting old stomping grounds (the UC Berkeley Campus). On Monday I attended a talk on certifications and eco-labeling, specifically related to food, given by a former advisee (Lauren Gwin) of my former advisor (Professor Sally Fairfax). Lauren is now affiliated with Oregon State University's extension service, and is furthering her Ph.D research on certifications and food labeling. One of her slides showed a label from a package of beef produced by White Oak Pastures in Georgia and was simply covered in labels for different kinds of certifications - some of these are also found on their website, and are collected above. It's a bit mind-boggling; I know what most of the labels mean because it's my job to know, but how can a busy mother with a three-year-old tugging her toward the candy aisle possibly make a decision about which product to buy based on these types of labels?

By and large, a certification is based on a performance standard about allowable practices or desired outcomes. They are usually voluntary, often independently verified, and typically fee-based (the produer pays the certifying organization for the use of the label). The certified entity can then use the certifier's logo for marketing purposes and in a perfect world, consumers "vote" with their wallets and aggregated consumer choices send a signal to the markets that this standard of practice is something that people are willing to pay for. Of course, the whole system relies on consumers being informed: not just about the status quo, but also about the solution purported by the certifying authority - and the way in which the certification in question helps move a situation from the former to the latter.

Very small companies making specialized products often cater to a very well defined market niche, while the large agribusinesses cover the mass market. Medium-sized businesses are stuck in the no-man's-land in the middle, without the scale to go national or international, and with a product that isn't quite unique enough to carve out its own place. Certifications can be a way for these medium-sized companies to define a niche for themselves, and set their products apart from those of the competition.

Lauren paid particular attention to the history of 'grass-fed' certification, and which I saw as a redux of the organic movement. Apparently the grass-fed meat movement stated out in quite an entrepreneurial way, and there was a lot of variation between what different producers considered 'grass-fed.' (This mostly centers around whether or not the animals can ever be fed grain, and if so in what proportion, but also considers issues like whether or not to use growth hormones and low-dose antibiotics not to treat illness, but to prevent animals from getting sick due to the stresses of feedlot life.) The USDA proposed a standard which specified that 80% of an animal's diet should be grass, which is basically a conventional farming system. The farmers promoting grass-fed beef campaigned for the USDA to tighten its standards, which it eventually did after a wave of public protest. The USDA's grass-fed standard, released in 2007, mandates that an animal's diet be 100% grass - but is silent on issues related to hormones and antibiotics. Of course, this is exactly what happened to the organic movement: 'organic' had also come to mean 'local' and 'small family farm,' and while the USDA's new standard requires that an 'organic' product be made of 100% organic ingredients, it too is silent on the local and family farm issues.

I do not see this as a fault of the USDA; the problem arises when proponents of things like local food and small family farms piggyback their causes onto movements like organics that have gained more traction. Small, local producers seem to feel betrayed when a standard is written such that a big business can achieve it - but 'organic' was never intended to also mean 'grown on a small farm.' Earthbound Farm suppiles the vast majority of organic lettuce consumed in the United States, and frozen produce grower Cascadian Farms, with its wholesome image (with evocative descriptions about a 28-acre farm that started the business and no mention of how many hundreds of acres they now have - and they even keep the roadside stand going!) is owned by General Mills: yet they, too, produce organics. Now we come to some circular logic: instead of attaching themselves to 'grass-fed' and 'organic' movements, local producers could instead sell their own wares and advertise their local status - but lo and behold, we're back to a plethora of labels that nobody has time to read.

The whole issue is one of scale. Small, local food purveyors argue that large-scale producers simply cannot achieve a high level of quality; that sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics are made necessary by the industrial scale of feed-lot operations and that the only way to get rid of the antibiotics is to get rid of the industrial farm. Reducing scale invariably seems to increase prices, so can we really tell the ~15% of Americans who live below the poverty line on a given day that they have to pay more for their ground beef because some people think it should carry a certain label? The point came up during the Q&A period that what we really need to do is to set a standard that we think is appropriate for animal care, and figure out how to distribute the costs of achieving that standard more fairly.