Best Practices for Organic Policy - What developing country - UNEP

I. Introduction and scope
This paper identifies best practices and lessons learned in countries around the world, regarding
effective and efficient government policies and actions to promote production and export of organic
agriculture products. The primary use of the report is as input to the CBTF project “Promoting
Production and Trading Opportunities for Organic Agricultural Products in East Africa”. Within that
framework, national policy recommendations for organic agriculture are developed for possible
adoption by the Governments of Kenya, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania respectively.
Recommendations made may also be relevant for other countries.
The scope of this report is organic farming and products thereof, thus it does not directly address
issues related to organic wild collection 2 , aquaculture and other branches of the organic sector.
Nevertheless, many of the recommendations and observations have relevance for these other areas.
Countries are different and have different priorities, and their policy choices will therefore be
different. Nevertheless, there are common elements in a good policy as well as in a bad policy. It is
perhaps easier in some cases to recommend what not to do than what to do. Recommendations are
made based on the assumption that Governments have identified that they should indeed promote the
organic sector, i.e. the report is not intended to convince Governments that they should support
organic agriculture. However, after this introduction there is an overview of organic agriculture and
indications of reasons for Governments to support organic policy. This is followed by the introduction
of case studies from Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, Malaysia, South Africa and Thailand. Other
experiences and literature form the basis for the analysis and the following recommendations
structured around main policy areas.
Naturally, the willingness to invest in organic agriculture is also linked to the general interest in the
agriculture sector by Governments and development partners, which is fuelled by increasing market
demand. In many countries, and in development cooperation, the agriculture sector has been neglected
in terms of appropriate investments, policies, private sector involvement, etc., despite the fact that
agriculture accounts for the main employment in most developing countries. There are some positive
signs that policymakers are once again realizing the enormous potential of agriculture for poverty
reduction in developing countries. In particular for the least developed countries, all experience
suggests that agriculture must play a leading role for development and growth. The African Union
leaders agreed in Maputo in 2003 to “adopt sound policies for agricultural and rural development, and
commit ourselves to allocating at least 10 per cent of national budgetary resources for their
implementation within five years”. It is recommended that some of that is used to promote the further
development of the organic agriculture sector.
2 Organic wild collection is a rather important activity in a number of countries. For more information, please
refer to the proceedings of the first IFOAM Conference for Organic Wild Production, Bosnia and Herzegovina
4–5 May 2006, available at www.ifoam.org.