Matt Reed's presentation at the Warwick Crop Centre, on the future of the organic food movement.

1. Organic 3.0:
The future of the organic
movement is participation &
the de-commodification of food.
Dr Matthew Reed

2. Outline
• Leading edge examples
• The turn into Organic 2.0 and how it was overcome
• The problem of non-farmers
• Beyond consumerism & challenges.

3. Village
vineyard,
Somerset
Unlabelled, community
produced, unsellable,
high quality product.

4. Orto Loco
CSA, organic farm,
membership = work

5. De Sitte
Urban Gardening and Community Shop, Ghent

8. Waves of the Global Organic Movement
Holism
Consumerism
Participation
1.0
2.0
3.0
Time
1970 20001920CC Matt Reed

9. – Fritz Schumacher 1971
“Right ideas, in order to become effective, must be
brought down and inculcated in this world and the
commercial interest must be made into servants of
correct ideas. Let us not defend a type of pristine
virginity to remain a little esoteric splinter group at a
time when the whole world is crying out for precisely
the kind of thinking
the Soil Association has been
engaged in for twenty-five years”

10. What broke Organic 2.0?
• Didn’t become big enough, fast enough
• Suited to the systems of the multiple retailers
• Consumer Benefits vs Public Goods
• Became ‘cool’, embraced social distinction
• Isolated within the environmental movement

11. Organic 3.0 IFOAM p:10
“The overall goal of Organic 3.0 is to enable a
widespread uptake of truly sustainable farming
systems and markets based on organic principles and
imbued with a culture of innovation, of progressive
improvement towards best practice, of transparent
integrity, of inclusive collaboration, of holistic
systems, and of true value pricing”

12. • Organic 3.0 discussion document uncertain which
non-farmers it is addressing
• ‘stakeholders’, ‘consumers’, ‘citizens’
• ‘democratize the value chain’ (p.15)
• “Consumer demand is not only essential to trigger
private sector supply but also government decisions
to create policies”
• Lacking imagination of the collective of citizens.

13. Beyond consumerism
• True Cost accounting - already present
• Participatory guarantee schemes - at scale
• self-provisioning,volunteering, CSAs, and crowd
funding - participation. (Agri-social schemes).
• Situated values - outside of its context loses
all/most of its value.

14. Problems
• How does
anyone make a
living?
• Mechanisms of
trust and
accountability?
• Stopping it
becoming cool?

15. • mreed@glos.ac.uk
• @ReedMTweet
• www.ccri.ac.uk
• www.theruralist.xyz