China's organic produce was on show at the inaugural BioFach China Organic expo and conference, held in Shanghai, China, in 2007. First world manufacturers are sourcing price competitive organic ingredients from China. Much of the produce displayed Green Food labelling and/or the new Chinese national organic logo which was introduced in 2005. The packaging was of a high standard, and there was a massive variety of produce on offer, much of it  targeted at the export market. The event attracted 208 exhibitors, 88% of them from China, 9% from Europe and 3% from elsewhere; there were no exhibitors from USA, Africa or Australia. The take away message from the expo? "Import? Export? Discover your best ally in China" and "let's nourish the world organically"

Paull, John

English

Organic Eprints

China’s organic food showcasedBy John PaullChina’s new message ‘Let’s Nourish the World Organically’From Mongolian organic milk to Tibetan wild wal-nut oil,  China’s  certiﬁed organic produce was re-cently  showcased  in  Shanghai  earlier  this  year, 2007.    The inaugural BioFach China Organic expo and conference attracted 208 exhibitors,  most of them from China.     The extraordinary organic  boom that has  been termed “China’s Organic Revolution” saw the acre-age  under organic management in China increase tenfold in the year 2006. As a consequence, China now  has  about  10%  of  the  world’s  organically managed land.      “Now  China is  a leader in organic foods” de-clared Peter LeCompte, Director of Purchasing for US Fortune 500 food company General Mills.       “China has  rapidly become  among  the largest suppliers of imported organic foods to the US mar-ket. The opportunities for continued export growth of organic foods from China is exciting”,  yet, “at the same  time, Americans  have  never been more concerned about the safety and honesty of organic foods  from China” he  told the  Shanghai  confer-ence.      “‘Product of  China’ is the  largest  single  com-plaint of all consumers who contact General Mills with a comment about our organic products”,  Mr LeCompte said.    He pointed out that many Americans fail to ap-preciate that “China is a large country with many areas of pristine, pure agriculture”.    According to LeCompte,  “Buyers are mandated to  ﬁnd  lowest  cost  options  for  their  companies. Pricing in China is very competitive in the world market”  while at the same time “the variety of or-ganic products from China continues  to grow”.      Delegates were told that “The opportunities for growth and expansion are  exciting. Today,  China represents  the  greatest  opportunity for new  prod-ucts and lower costs”.    LeCompte pointed out that “In China the growth of organic foods and management of organic certi-ﬁcation has been guided by trading companies fo-cussed on export”.       He emphasized that the success of China’s con-tinuing expansion of organic agriculture depended on the integrity of the certiﬁcation process.     Stefan  Hipp,  the  Managing  Director  of  Ger-many’s Hipp GmbH & Co, described his company as  “the world’s  leading organic baby-food manu-facturer” and reiterated that  European companies also,  including  Hipp,  were  actively  looking  to source Chinese organic ingredients for their proc-essed food. Competitive prices and consistent qual-ity were what manufacturers were seeking, he said.      Heinz Kuhlman,  from BioFach Japan,  told the conference that China’s  role,  at  least for the time being,  was as a low  cost exporter of bulk organic ingredients. Chinese organic ingredients could then be  incorporated  into  processed  food  products  in ﬁrst world countries, where most of the processing and packaging,  as  well as sales,  of organic food occurs.   In seeking the cheapest source of ingredients, the unstated agenda of manufacturers  is  that in many countries, including Australia, the country of origin of  ingredients  need  not  be  declared,  and  conse-quently rarely is.    Xianjun Li, the Deputy Director of China Organic Food Certiﬁcation Centre (COFCC) told delegates that  “Traditional farming is  the basis of organic”.       So, for China organic agriculture is partly a return to the  agricultural  know-how  developed over the centuries.        Green Food is a Chinese innovation and has pro-vided  Chinese  farmers  with  an  innovative  and structured path to becoming organic.    The China Green Food Development Centre was founded in 1992. It developed a certiﬁcation system whereby inputs are monitored and farm outputs are tested for pesticide residues.    Once in place, two grades of Green Food, A and AA, were designated.      Then,  in the course of the next few  years  the Green Food AA standard was tweaked to meet the international organic standards of IFOAM (Interna-tional  Federation  of  Organic  Agriculture  Move-ments).    With an international standard,  Chinese produce can gain entry to international markets, and thereby access  the  premium  prices  that  organic  food  at-tracts.BIOFACH CHINA________________________________________________________________________________________________Reprinted from: Acres Australia, 2007, Vol 15, Number 2, pp 31 - 32.   There are 38 organic certiﬁer organisations oper-ating in China, Xianjun Li told the conference. Of these,  31  are  Chinese  certiﬁers  and  seven  are foreign-based certiﬁers.    In 2006 China’s organic output, from 2300 enter-prises, working 5,280,000 hectares, was 3,850,000 tons, and “All provinces in the main land have or-ganic farming”, Li told the delegates.Fig. 2: Xianjun Li, the Deputy Director of the China Or-ganic food Certiﬁcation Centre reported that by the end of 2006 China had 3.2 million hectares of land certiﬁed organic or in-conversion, and additionally 2,080,000 Ha certiﬁed organic wild collection.  In 2004 agricultural exports from China amounted to US$23 Billion of which 1.7% was then organic, Li said.    Within China, organic food has only very recently been appearing in supermarkets, and it is still rela-tively,  or entirely,  unknown to most Chinese con-sumers. Two things  can help change this.  Firstly, display panels explaining to consumers the beneﬁts of “certiﬁed organic food”, together with selections of organic foods,  are now evident in Shanghai su-permarkets.     Secondly, the new  national organic logo,  intro-duced in 2005,  is now  mandated for all Chinese organic produce,  and this makes deciphering label claims more straightforward for consumers, and the process  of  differentiating  organic  from  other claims, quicker and easier.    Under the national standard of 2005, in China, no food can now be just self-declared as organic. This is  unlike the situation in Australia,  where  anyone can call their food offerings “organic”, and be sub-ject only to the Trade Practices Act.   The motivations for China adopting organic pro-duction are economic, environmental and social.          The FAO have identiﬁed organic agriculture as a means of alleviating poverty in Asia - and the Chi-nese  national  government  is  actively  setting “wealth” as a goal for its citizenry. The  process  of  conversion  and  certiﬁcation  of farms is  facilitated,  in many regions of China, by the practice of local  governments reportedly usu-ally paying the fees involved in organic conversion, certiﬁcation  and training,  and  hence  accelerating the adoption. Whether it is sold into the local Chi-nese  market,  or  into  the  export  market,  organic produce attracts a price premium.    Xianjun Li told the delegates that in the Chinese domestic  market,  organic  certiﬁed food  sells  for three  times  the  price  of  conventional  food.  This 200%  premium  in  China  compares  to  the  80% premium previously reported in Australia.    Organic is also a means of China inﬁltrating the output of its massive food production capacity into export markets  - markets that might  otherwise be wary of, or non-receptive to, China-grown food.    The so-called green revolution and the industrial economic boom have brought in their wake serious environmental problems for China, and pollution is immediately evident to a visitor. The awareness of pollution as a challenge to the well being of China seems to be now  uppermost in many minds,  and remedies are being actively sought.    Organic agriculture is seen as part of the solution - by eschewing pesticides, enhancing soil attributes, and  bringing health beneﬁts  to  farmers  and  con-sumers. Many displays at the trade fair placed an emphasis on the health beneﬁts of organics. Fig. 2: Exhibitors at the ﬁrst BioFach China Organic Trade Fair & Conference held in Shanghai: 88% from China, 9% from Europe, 3% from elsewhere, none from Australia.     Biofach China’s  inaugural  event  attracted 208 exhibitors.  Of  these,  182  were  from  mainland China, two were from Hong Kong, and three were China Europe Other3% 9%88%BIOFACH CHINA________________________________________________________________________________________________Reprinted from: Acres Australia, 2007, Vol 15, Number 2, pp 31 - 32.0K Ha500K Ha1,000K Ha1,500K Ha2,000K Ha2,500K HaCertiﬁed In Conversion Wild2006 Organic Hectares - Chinafrom Taiwan.  Of the remaining 21 exhibitors, 11 were  from  Germany,  three  were  from Italy,  and there was one exhibitor from each of France, Hol-land, Switzerland, Finland, Turkey, Brazil and Ma-laysia. There  were no exhibitors  from Australia, Africa or North America.   The range of Chinese organic produce presented was both vast and comprehensive, and ranged from the familiar to the unusual, from the identiﬁable to the unidentiﬁable.   From Jinxiang, ‘the Garlic Capital of China’, or-ganic garlic was available freshly packaged, peeled, in  vinegars,  salted,  powdered,  ﬂaked  and  granu-lated.   Organic oils on display included peanut, almond, camellia  seed,  walnut,  sunﬂower,  ﬂaxseed,  and pumpkin seed. An intriguing array of exotic fungi was  presented. Tea was  the ﬁrst  certiﬁed organic product to be exported from China, in 1990, and for the tea connoisseur or dilettante there was a bewil-dering array of varietal  and specialty teas on dis-play at the ﬁrst Bifach China.    Organic vegetables on offer included beans, yam, celery, broccoli, tomato, taro, mushrooms, “Tibetan toadstools”,  onions,  ginger,  carrots,  potatoes,  cab-bage, cauliﬂower, chilli, and lotus. Vegetables were available fresh, frozen or dried.   Of organic fruit, there was a wide selection which included Fuji apples, Huaniu apples, Quinguan ap-ples, Royal Gala apples, Redstar apples, Ya pears, Su pears,  Fengshui pears,  Shandong pears,  Snow pears, Navel oranges, mandarins, grapefruit, “Kiwi-fruit”,  dates,  grapes,  persimmon,  pomegranates, and  nectarines.  Fruit  was  offered  fresh,  dried or juiced.   Such a choice: rice, a plethora of various grains and seeds, beans including soy, mung, adzuki, red kidney,  seeds  including,  ﬂax,  millet,  agaric,  sun-ﬂower, pumpkin, nuts including peanuts, almonds, and walnuts, juices, “herbs & extracts”, wine, eggs, black pigs, seafood, and, despite the recent Austra-lian controversy, even a choice of organic Chinese bottled waters!   After completing an MBE in Melbourne ‘Tony’ Chen Xiang Dong returned to China to develop an organic wine business. He was promoting his Bo-LongBao Winery at BioFach. The wine bears bilin-gual labelling - French and Chinese.   The  exotic  Mongolian  specialty,  organic  sea-buckthorn berry, valued for its health-food and me-dicinal properties, and described as high in Vitamin C, Folic Acid, ﬂavonoids and antioxidants is sold as seed oil, juice, and powdered food supplement.    The  Raohe National Nature  Protection Area  of Northeast Black Bee is described as  6765 km2  of “uninhabited primeval forest”  on the China/Russia border. The apiary operating in “the only national nature protection area for bee in Asia”  produces organic  products  including  honey,  propolis,  bee pollen powder  and  royal  jelly,  and employs  “the only bee kind protected by the China government”.    The propolis is described as a “natural antibiotic”.   “Black bee organic linden honey”  from “the lin-den tree in the virgin forest” we are told is “a kind of precious  natural  invigorant”.  The  products  are certiﬁed by Europe’s ECOCERT.     The  Chinese Academy of  Forestry  was  repre-sented by their Pine Pollen Research & Develop-ment Centre. The “pine pollen rain”  is harvested as a food supplement. The pollen is shed in Spring by the  “Masson  pine”  from  “the  Thousand  Island Lakes in Zhejiang Province” described as “the big-gest state-level forest park”.    The Academy of Forestry claims that  “The pine pollen  is  genuinely  a  natural  organic  food” and provides “supplementary protection to chemically damaged liver and improving the immune system regulation”.    The consumer packaging on display at BioFach China was both attractive and of a high standard.    While all exhibitors were required to hold organic certiﬁcation, some products bore both organic and Green Food AA logos.     Not all packaging had caught  up with the new government  requirement  to  bear  the  ofﬁcial  bi-lingual (Chinese & English) organic logo - the red football  girdled  by  a  green  ribbon,  Saturnesque logo  -  it  comes  in  two versions:  “Organic” and “Conversion to Organic”. Many products bore the COFCC two-leaves organic logo.   Xianjun Li identiﬁed ﬁve-plus-one reasons why Chinese consumers choose organic:  “Safe, impor-tant  for  health,  without  chemical  residues,  good taste and it guarantees  quality”  and he speculated on a sixth reason - it is claimed that by eating or-ganically “a family is more likely to have a son”.    Shanghai is a hi-tech and vibrant city of 20 mil-lion inhabitants, with a fast and efﬁcient metro sys-tem currently undergoing major expansion. Metro tickets  are  credit-card  like  and  are  machine-captured when passengers  exit the  rail  network - recovered and electronically recoded for resale and reuse - a zero waste system that generates no ticket litter.      The  city is  undergoing  a  rapid  transformation with ramshackle old areas being ﬂattened and re-placed with wide tree-lined boulevards incorporat-BIOFACH CHINA________________________________________________________________________________________________Reprinted from: Acres Australia, 2007, Vol 15, Number 2, pp 31 - 32.ing dedicated bike paths, and architecturally fanci-ful  high-rise  buildings  embedded  in  green parklands. Urban planning in Shanghai is empha-sizing green belts and trees.    The take home message for BioFach China can be summed up by China Food & Beverage’s: “Im-port?  Export?  Discover  your best  ally in China” and  Hengsoy’s  mission statement:  “Let’s  nourish the world organically”. _________________________________________John Paull is an environmental scientist with a special interest in organics and can be emailed at: john.paull@anu.edu.au.BIOFACH CHINA________________________________________________________________________________________________Reprinted from: Acres Australia, 2007, Vol 15, Number 2, pp 31 - 32.

China's organic food showcased

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