Competing standards could be seen as a problem, but only if consumers aren’t able to find out what they mean. If they don’t bother to look it up then they obviously don’t care all that much! Now this could be a situation like Bill was talking about this morning where people don’t know that they need to look it up. But that’s why we have posts like this attempting to bring the issue to people’s attention 😉

On the point of organic vs quality, I think the question then becomes, ‘what do people really want’? Maybe they just want to signal that they care by buying organic and don’t really care about the quality!

But what is good?

‘Healthy’ is not easy to define – I’ve seen plenty of sugary foods carry the heart foundation tick (bad for your teeth is not necessarily bad for your heart) I’m sure most of the fatty foods could get the dental association tick if they wanted. 

Organic has a bunch of certifications – but people confuse this with quality – nothing shows that organic foods are any more nutritious or taste any better – the organic certification is about protecting soils and waterways from chemical pollution – and even then it’s not perfect – the worst of the approved ‘organic’ pesticides are more harmful than a bunch of the ‘chemical’ pesticides, so how much better organic is for soils still depends on the approach taken by the individual farming operation.

Then there is stuff like ‘Rainforest Alliance Certified’ that McDonalds have adopted as a pilot in NZ as an alternative to Fair Trade.
Rainforest alliance has 10 standards that tick all the right boxes in terms of protecting land, waterways, wokers conditions etc – but the great thing for the budget conscious multinational is that they only require 80% overall compliance with a minimum of 50% on any given standard – plus they only require 30% of the product to be certified in order to carry the Rainforest Alliance (to their credit McDonalds NZ source 100% certified product although they are not required to)
http://www.ethicalcoffee.net/rainforest.html 
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Healthy-People-Healthy-Planet/Rainforest-Alliance-Certification.aspx

And then there are companies like Dole – who picked an ISO standard or two to comply with and made up their own “Ethical Choice” sticker:
http://www.dolenz.co.nz/social/

And the Dilmah family – who don’t comply with any externally audited standard – they give a “significant share”of their profit to a charitable foundation in their native Sri Lanka. There is really no way of knowing how that stacks up in terms of ‘good’ relative to a conventional fair trade certification.
http://www.mjffoundation.org/welcome-to-mjf-charitable-foundation

There is a saying that in politics you get to vote once every three years for the kind of society you want but as a consumer you get to vote every day with your wallet. That’s all well an good – but as an ethical consumer it seems like a proportional, mixed member, preference ranked, transferable vote system where the parties change every year or so and the candidates switch more often than that….