Certified organic agriculture in Mexico: Market connections and certification practices in large and small producers

By Laura Gómez Tovar, Lauren Martin, Manuel Ángel Gómez Cruz, T. Mutersbaugh. 2005

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Certification within organic agriculture exhibits flexibility with respect to practices used to demonstrate that a product meets published quality standards. This case study of Mexican certified-organic agriculture finds two forms. Indigenous smallholders of southern Mexico undertake a low-input, process-oriented organic farming in which certification is based upon extensive document review, group inspections, and assessment of on-farm capacity to produce organic inputs. More recently, northern Mexican large agribusiness producers have implemented certifications based upon laboratory testing and assessment of purchased inputs. To specify these differences, this article examines large and small producers in Mexico's organic agriculture sector based on a diagnostic census of Mexican organic agriculture in 668 production zones and field surveys in 256 production zones in which 28 indicators were analyzed. After comparing the organic cultivation and certification practices of large, agro-industrial, input-oriented private firms versus small, cooperatively organized, indigenous and peasant groups, we analyze the implications of this duality for certification frameworks. We argue (with Raynolds, L., 2004. The globalization of organic agro-food networks. World Development 32(5), 725–743; Gonzalez A.A., and Nigh, R., 2005. Smallholder participation and certification of organic farm products in Mexico. Journal of Rural Studies; DeLind, L., 2000. Transforming organic agriculture into industrial organic products: reconsidering national organic standards. Human Organization 59(2), 198–208) that the increasing bureaucratic requirements of international organic certification privilege large farmers and agribusiness-style organic cultivation and present the possibility of a new entrenchment of socio-spatial inequality in Mexico. While organic and fair trade agriculture has been touted as an income-generating production strategy for small producers of the Global South, our study suggests that Mexican organic agriculture reproduces existing social inequalities between large and small producers in conventional Mexican agriculture.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Plant Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4aaa94ca9ffb522408a03a3e76046ec42db9c48

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Citations in the corpus

Reviewing the impacts of coffee certification programmes on smallholder livelihoods (2017, background): “Effective prior producer organisation (such as good management and leadership) was also widely reported to enable the successful introduction and implementation of certification schemes (Tovar et al. 2005; Lyon et al. 2010; Bacon 2005; Jena et al. 2012; Utting 2009).”
Fighting Standards with Standards: Harmonization, Rents, and Social Accountability in Certified Agrofood Networks (2005, background): “…barriers to entry, and would be in a competitive position with respect to retailers and large-scale `plantation organic' fincas (of over 20 hectares)öthat in the absence of stringent labor standards may otherwise come to dominate Latin American organic production (Gomez Tovar et al, 2005).”
Spatial scale and social impacts of biofuel production (2011, background): “[27] Gomex Tovar L, Martin L, Gomez Cruz MA, Mutersbaugh T.”
Environmental Certification of Forests in Mexico: The Political Ecology of a Nongovernmental Market Intervention (2006, background): “In addition to environmental certification of forests (Rametsteiner and Simula 2003; Cashore, Auld, and Newsom 2004; Morris and Dunne 2004; Taylor 2005b), other examples of nongovernmental marketbased regulation include organic certification of agriculture (Allen et al. 2003; Guthman 2004a; Gómez T”