IATP President Jim Harkness is blogging from China through June 14.
After a restful overnight train ride down to Shanghai from Beijing, I was able to check into my hotel and still make it to the opening of the BioFach China 2008 International Organic Trade Fair and Conference.
There are over 300 exhibitors and the organizers expect 10,000 or more people to attend. The crowd today was mostly Chinese, many of them organic producers and people considering converting to organic. Lots of people were simply enjoying the free samples of organic everything: rice, dumplings, honey, walnuts, pork, corn on the cob, milk, tea, fruit and vegetables. Admission was free as long as you filled out a registration form and a variety of non-organic entrepreneurs clearly saw this as an opportunity. Three different men offered me fake Rolexes inside the exhibition! I kept expecting to see knockoff “Organic” brand vegetables for sale. I also met people from as far away as Fiji, Trinidad and Ghana--all of them from government import inspection agencies.
The vast majority of products being exhibited were Chinese-grown and intended for export, but speakers at a workshop being held concurrently with the exhibition pointed out that this is a less and less promising area. No one talked explicitly about the food safety scandals of the past year, but Mr. Chuk Ng of Naturz Organics pointed out that more and more products are being turned back by customs agents in Europe. Mr. Li Xianjun of the China Organic Food Certification Center (COFCC) noted that organics are a shrinking percentage of China’s agriculture exports. Ong Kung Wai, representing IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Movements), said that only 3 percent of all global organic sales are currently outside of Europe and North America (and most of that is probably in Japan). He urged producers in China to focus on “growing” the domestic organic market.
We at IATP also see the potential for organic agriculture in China to help feed their domestic market. Government support for both organic food and food safety are currently almost entirely focused on exports, leaving 1.4 billion Chinese consumers with a deeply compromised and unsustainable food supply. Surveys have consistently shown that China’s urban middle class is concerned about the safety and quality of their food supply and willing to pay more for food they can trust. But an exhibitor, Thomas Lin from Garden Citi Inc, explained to me that the term “organic” is unfamiliar in China, and there is rampant counterfeiting of “green foods.” One of the speakers in the workshop said that there is also a much larger price premium for organics in China than in the West. Here organics are generally three times as expensive as equivalent conventionally-grown products. In the U.S., the difference is closer to 25 percent.
Why is there such a great difference in price? Are there obstacles for organic agriculture in China? Or subsidies supporting conventional agriculture that make it so much cheaper? Tune in again…
