MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands targets Australian organic certification scheme

THE Falkland Islands Development Corporation is to abandon its previous involvement with organic certification.

The decision followed an announcement to the Development Board at its Tuesday meeting that FIDC and the Agricultural Department had decided to abandon ongoing attempts to seek organic accreditation with the British Soil Association in favor of an Australian scheme called, Biological Farmers of Australia. (BFA) Following training in Britain some years ago, Charlene Rowland the Department of Agriculture, had been responsible for inspection and assessment of farms wishing to have organic certification. Unfortunately, as Charlene explained to Penguin News,this certification carried no weight with international meat buyers and attempts to obtain acceptable international accreditation through the medium of the British Soil Association had foundered in the face of some of their demands. As an example, requiring lamb marking to be carried out within five days of birth did not take into account the essentially "ranching" nature of Falkland Islands sheep farming, which was much more similar to Australian procedure. Following a suggestion by Mike Forrest that FIDC should get out of organic certification altogether and leave it to the Agricultural Department, this course was adopted without much further discussion. A further proposal by Councilor John Birmingham that the cost of registration in the Australian scheme should be regarded by farms as a legitimate business expense and not the subject of subsidy, will now be for the Agriculture department to decide, an FIDC spokesperson said. At the Agricultural Advisory Committee meeting last week, members were told there has been progress in seeking accreditation for farms that are keen to gain organic status through Australia Certified Organic (ACO), following a visit from Andrew Monk of Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA) Ian Campbell has passed his training and become an auditor for BFA. A draft memorandum of understanding between the DoA and BFA is awaiting approval. Although the Director of Minerals and Agriculture predicted that any farm that was not presently in an organic scheme would be looking at a time scale of three years to achieve organic status with BFA, the good news for those who had continued in the original FI organic farming scheme was that qualification time should be much shorter. Penguin News