Not all in good taste

Modern China is chasing good healthy clean food as it never has before. After several food contamination scares in recent years, people find themselves uncertain about what food products can be trusted. Many city people these days are putting their faith in organic foods.

The people who grow organic foods are not always, it seems, average farmers. At the Shanghai Nonghao Farmers' Market, most of the farmers selling organic products are well-educated and hail from the city. Many used to work in offices in Shanghai.

Now they harvest the cabbages, spinach, garlic, carrots, potatoes and tomatoes that are proving increasingly popular. Although they lack official certificates, the farmers at this market promise their products are truly organic. Even more so, they say, than many of the country's major organic food companies.

The Shanghai Nonghao Farmers' Market first opened last year. It's a small event that sees the market appear at different places and different times through the city. It has become popular with health food enthusiasts because the foods on sale have been grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, addictives, or genetically modified organisms.

"People can get reliable organic products here because anyone can check on the production process," Yi Xiaowu, one of the market organizers, told the Global Times. At present 10 farms supply the market with produce.

The market is not the first of its kind in China. "We modeled ourselves on a Beijing organic food market which promotes organic food produced by individual farmers," Yi said.

The phenomenon of individual organic farms has sprung up after the country suffered a string of widely publicized food frauds.

China has about 25 organizations that certify organic foods. Most are private companies and they administer a range of different logos and certificates. There have been reports of so-called organic food companies getting certificates just by paying fees.

Reliability the key

Shanghai Nonghao Farmers' Market just held its ninth gathering on a weekend last month. Nearly 600 shoppers visited on the day and watched some of the farmers occasionally eating produce that had not been washed - just to prove that it was safe and healthy.

"We put great store on the credibility of our products. Unlike big farms which have customers coming and going all the time, we have a relatively fixed customer group. If our food cannot be relied on, we would lose our customers for good," said Chen Shuaijun, one of the farmers at the market.

Chen runs a 4-hectare ecologically-friendly farm on Chongming Island. About 60 customers have signed purchasing contracts with him. Chen delivers his food to his customers' homes.

"Unlike the big organic companies which attract customers by advertising and marketing, individual farmers don't have the money to promote themselves. We rely on word of mouth to attract business. If customers feel our products are good, naturally they will introduce their relatives and friends," Chen said. "If a customer finds that our product contains chemical residue we will reimburse all of the money paid. I promise this in the contract."

Though the farmers are confident about the quality of their products and say it is comparable to officially certified organic foods, they lack the irrigation equipment and soil treatment processes that the large organic farms use.

To gain an organic food certificate, farm soil has to go through a "conversion period" of two to three years.

"During this time chemical pesticides and fertilizers are prohibited. This helps clean the chemical residues in the soil and makes the soil healthier," Wang Nan, the director of the Shanghai Quality Safety Center of?Agricultural Products, one of Shanghai's organic food certification bodies, told the Global Times.

As well the large organic farms can spend a lot of money adopting irrigation systems. Tony's Farm, a large city organic food provider, spent 66 million yuan ($10.48 million) on its irrigation system at its farm in what used to be Nanhui district (now a part of Pudong New Area).

But most small farmers cannot afford this intensive soil and water treatment.

"I don't think organic farming needs to go to extremes. These barriers are set to keep small farmers out of the certified organic food industry," complained Jia Ruiming, who runs an ecologically-friendly farm on Chongming Island.

"The best way to protect the environment is to stop using chemicals," Jia said. "But I know that not all the certified organic farms in the city keep this rule."
He would not name the farms he believes use chemicals.

A big price gap

In China farm products can be labeled "ordinary," "pollution-free," "green," or "organic." Organic food products are regarded as the purest. But organic foodstuffs are a very small part of China's food basket.

"Only 0.20 percent of vegetables produced in China are organic. The percentage in some Western countries can be as high as 10 percent. So there is a big price difference between organic and ordinary products here," said Huang Danfeng, an expert in agriculture from the School of Agriculture and Biology at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Organic vegetables usually cost five times as much as ordinary vegetables in China. However, in the Netherlands, organic vegetables, fruit, milk, and eggs cost about twice the price of unorganic products. Organic coffee beans and teas cost more - around 15 times the price of ordinary coffee beans and teas, Huang Danfeng said.

The big price gap has inspired several food companies to join the organic market, but not all of them follow the industry's rules.

"Because the industry lacks transparency, some companies can triple or increase their prices five-fold by marking products 'organic.' There are certainly fraudulent organic companies and products in the shops," said Tony's Farm marketing director Mao Liang.

Apparently Chinese consumers and overseas consumers often buy organic foods for different reasons.

"Domestic buyers choose organic food because they are worried about food safety and are willing to pay a premium for relatively safer food productions," Mao said.

Shanghai Nonghao market organizer Yi Xiaowu said many of the customers who come to the market are families with "special" needs. "Families with children or pregnant women will buy organic food. Sometimes to save money others in the family will just eat ordinary foodstuffs," he said.

Huang suggested that overseas consumers often had a different approach. "Overseas people produce and consume organic products to protect the environment and improve their lifestyles," she said.

One problem with organic foods in China is classification and certification. Officially approved organic food has two labels. One is a general organic logo and the other is the label of the certifying body, the Shanghai Quality Safety Center director Wang Nan said. To display these, companies must apply to one of the 25 or so organic certifying bodies.

"The process is strict. The certifying body checks the company's facilities, manufacturing records, checks the production process and runs random tests on the products before granting a certificate. The registered organic producer needs to apply for a new certificate each year and we run a similar series of checks then as well," Wang said.

She said she realized there could be problems with some of the private certifying bodies.

The Southeast Morning Post reported last year that one organic certifying agent in Shandong Province promised clients certificates if they paid 18,000 yuan. The Shandong Aobeier Certification Advisory Center said on its website that it had a 100 percent success rate for applicants for organic food certificates.

"The applicant must be a cooperative or a company. It costs 18,000 yuan for those with a farm under 33 hectares. It only takes a year to get a certificate," an employee from the center told the newspaper.

Other companies offer "conversion certificates" within three months. A conversion certificate shows that food has been grown in soil that is undergoing conversion, according to the report.

The wide variety of labels leaves ordinary consumers confused. A customer at the City Shop supermarket in Jing'an district said that she did not pay attention to organic food labels, but trusted the selection of the supermarket. "I choose organic food when I want a salad. But I do not look for particular labels," she said.

Another customer surnamed Zhang said that he understood there were different types of organic labels, but he did not care which label was displayed. "I think organic food is at least safer than ordinary food, whether it has a label or not," he said.

A growing problem

Organic labels do not necessarily mean the food is really "organic." The Global Times has researched one company that claimed its supermarket food was organic but was in fact ordinary foodstuffs bought from a State-owned farm and resold.

Farmer Chen Shuaijun said this was a common practice in the organic food business.

"Big organic companies promise their clients that they can provide a certain amount of certain kinds of vegetables. However when their harvest falls short they have to buy from other sources and not all the products they purchase are necessarily organic," he said.

Though organic products carry labels, it is often difficult to trace their origins.

"Labels are put on the packages by the producers. There is no supervision to ensure that the labels are properly used. There is no guarantee that the labels are only kept for the company's specific products," he said.

Chen said some of his clients used to buy organic products from supermarkets. "Now many come to me because they think it is safer to buy products from growers where they can check the production process themselves." He encourages customers to bring their families to his farm to see exactly how their food is produced.

Another farmer, Jia Ruiming, said small-scale farming was more trustworthy as it shortened the process between farmers and consumers and was realistic about food. "Farmers can tell their customers how the harvest is going. Customers have to accept the food that is produced even if it does not look so good. Customers have to learn to accept that sometimes there will not be as much available because of inclement weather," Jia said.