Ethics and Agriculture

The International Forum for Organic Olive Oil is approaching a new topic for its 10th edition: agriculture and ethics. It would be more appropriate to talk about olive growing and ethics since this is our main focus. However, we think that our particular perspective could work as concrete proposal to shift from the detail to the general picture.
Ethics within productive systems has been recently debated. The main tasks seem to be: ethics as a new syntax for future development and ethics as a need of society.

The first theme passes through all the places of the civil activity, both social and economical (if there is still a need to keep them separately). The debate is mostly philosophical even if it tries to trace a road map for the human activities. On this path the Catholic Church offered recently an example, as well as a part of the political and cultural world.

The second task is a river fed by several springs. The personal uneasiness, for those who feel it, that find a natural way out in the “consumeristic” sphere of the daily life by stop purchasing brands with a low ethical profile. The origin of these feelings may be found in the brand policies that pushes individual within their personal sphere, or in the astonishing discoveries about criminal activities by well known brands and companies against workers, weak populations, and the environment.
Some other times, the discomfort origins from a disproportion between the value and the prize paid, and by the awareness of the large companies’ share of profit: value and price are too far, and the same meaning of value is questioned. Other than the negative reaction toward consumption, the reaction to the finds positive guises: people often look for those who can guarantee an ethical profile.

Another spring feeding the river of the need for ethics comes from the productive world. The cases of inhuman work conditions and of overwhelming contractual power are over and over unsustainable and not tolerable. Unsustainable not just ethically but also economically. The economic and credit crisis is probably dismantling a system of connivances that made it possible to sustain this situation. We find here again the disproportion between price and value that often hides unbearable work conditions and environmental disasters, this time not in Countries far from our home place but within the national boundaries. Poverty is coming back not just because of the economic crisis, but on the shoulders of off-limits work and social condition. The exploitation of immigrants during the harvesting season, the recent events in Rosarno (Southern Italy) and other episodes in the rest of Europe are just some examples. Still, another uneasiness comes from the associative and volunteers’ world whose awareness is more often organized and that uses its own grammar, communicating with precise rules and more efficiently. The associationism is more experienced, it is able to lobby and interact in different ways, it has its own bureaucracy, assuming almost the shape of a second political playground.

Everything seem to point to a shift in the collective sensibility and in both the collective and individual knowledge (cognition) of reality.

We can add a third plane of discussion: comsumption. A specification is required at this point: we hardly like to use the terms “consumption” and “consumer” persuased that the there is another vocabulary to descrive the and discuss of economics or of just the purchasing behavior, but we do not want to load this discussion. Comsumption and the use of ethics for marketing purposes, then.

(Before and) During the Forum we would like to pose sevral questions, both generic and specific.

Some of the generic questions that we address you from now to the 28th of April 2010 (day of the Forum) are: how to use ethical contents to enhance local (rural) productive systems? How to guarantee a “fair” value, specifically, for the food products? Is it necessary to guarantee farmers a “fair” income? And how? Could certification labels and protocols be a appropriate answer? Could it be ethic the answer? Could ethic be used as a marketing tool? If so, is it ethical itself? How to do it?

Among the specific questions we would like to work on there is the emblematic case of olive oil market. Revenues’ guaratee for the olive producers has been largely debated and know it seems to be more uncertain than ever. The organic alternative guaranteed for a while, or it could have guarateed, the chance for product differentiation and a more fair supply chain in terms of value distribution.

This is just one of the tasks for the 10th International Forum on Organic Olive Growing. What kind of example does organic olive growing offer to the rest of agriculture? How to improve the chaces it offers? On which line to work for innovation?
We aim to animate a debate that could lead to useful results, possibly stimulating concrete actions and projects, hoping to gain.