Certification for organic farming: Notice issued

A division bench, comprising Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad, before whom the public interest litigation came up on Monday, issued notice returnable by three weeks.

The petitioner Selvam Ramaswamy had submitted that while Section 18(3) of the Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSAI) clearly states that it will not regulate farmers or farming practice, the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP) and Participatory Guarantee System (PGS), which are Organic Farming Certification System, seeks to regulate farmers.

Noting that both the certification systems target the farmers and not the sellers, the petitioner submitted that as per the regulations, it is the farmer who must maintain extensive records right from what kind of seeds they are using to how they are transporting their produce and submit the same for obtaining certification. 

Moreover, NPOP is expensive since it was created in the context of export and the PGS system requires that a minimum of five farmers with continuous boundaries come together, which does not often happen. Both these systems are documentation intensive and put the burden of certification on the individual farmer, making it financially unviable, especially for small farmers who sell domestically and individually.

Now many of the organic shops are stopping procurement from these small individual organic farmers as these organic farmers do not have the documentation and money to be certified under NPOP or PGS. It is effectively going to discourage small farmers from becoming organic with the result that organic food is only available to the affluent, the petitioner said.

The petitioner also submitted that while it is important to ensure that standards of quality are maintained, and people do not misrepresent their produce, the present regulations place an onerous and discriminatory burden on the farmers who are trying to produce healthy food for other citizens.

“It is almost as if we are being penalised for being farmers and for undertaking organic farming,” the petitioner added and sought the court to declare the Food Safety and Standards (Organic Foods) Regulation, 2017 to be ultra vires Section 18(3) of the Food Safety & Standards Act, 2006 and unconstitutional.