Organic Insights Magazine - Summer 2022

4 / Organic Insights / Summer 2022

Our draft Strategic Plan will be released for consultation on our website early in the New Year.

strategic plan

Highlights from our recent AGM

Strategic Planning in the current, ever changing sustainability environment is difficult. NASAA Organic has considered the multiplicity of sustainability certifications that Australian primary producers can now apply to their operations and produce. Our participation in several industry forums has enabled us to capture cross industry sentiment (conventional and organic) to better understand the current positioning of organic in agribusiness.

AUSTRALIAN REGENERATIVE ORGANIC STANDARD (AROS) The NOSTC has also been asked to create an Australian Regenerative Organic Standard (AROS). Regenerative organic certification is developing around the World, with ‘regenerative’ being the zeitgeist in the way that ‘sustainable’ was in the mid 1980’s when NASAA was formed. The US based Regenerative Organic Certified® has emerged as the primary (or only) formal certification scheme for regenerative agriculture, developed by the non-profit Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA). However, it is currently only applicable to US NOP certified operators. AROS has potential to be the first formal regenerative organic standard outside of the US. The NOSTC have already completed a gap analysis of the NASAA Organic Standard with the Regenerative Organic Certified® standard, revealing that the NOS is already well progressed towards a regenerative standard. In our preparation to offer regenerative organic certification,

This collective information, and our vision for a more active program of work at NASAA Organic, together with globally competitive certification offerings from NCO, has informed the Strategic Plan. As an ethically based company, our Strategic Plan also includes an explicit Ethics statement that considers the impact of NASAA’s activities and aims to achieve best practice, acknowledging our staff members, volunteers, members, and certified operators. Our aim is to deliver a plan that is practical, straightforward and in plain language, providing direction and practical advice to the Board, staff, members, and certified operators – about what we do and what we intend to do. It is a document that members and stakeholders will be able to pick up and see at a glance, the strategic goals of the organisation. Members will be asked for their considered feedback and comment on the draft plan upon release. We have appointed a NASAA Organic Standard and Technical Committee (NOSTC), led by Stephanie Goldfinch as Secretary, and comprising representatives from diverse backgrounds in organic and regenerative agriculture, as well as NCO staff. The NOSTC will provide a technical reference point to answer queries on Standards issues and has started work on reviewing and updating the NOS, with a completion goal of July 2023. When this process is complete, a draft updated Standard will be circulated widely to members and other stakeholders for comment. NASAA STANDARDS REVIEW & UPDATE

the NASAA Organic website and promotional literature will be amended to address ‘sustainable, organic and regenerative’ to align with the increased recognition of regenerative terminology and its importance As we move toward the development of an Australian Organic Regenerative Standard, we look at the commonalities and differences in organic, sustainable, and regenerative systems, and the role that certification plays in defining a benchmark for consumer guarantee. SUSTAINABLE, ORGANIC, REGENERATIVE? WHAT DO THEY MEAN AND WHERE DO WE SIT? One of the earliest organisations to adopt the word sustainable in its name, and NASAA chose this word because it had a great deal of currency in environmental debates at the time, and because we thought that it made a statement about why we were organic. Consideration was given to using the word regenerative, which was very new at that time (regenerative agriculture was coined by Robert Rodale in the early 1980’s), but we decided that it was not well enough understood. A further reason for sustainable being chosen was consideration being given to the fact that we wanted to send a message to all growers who wanted to change their system to one that was less reliant on harmful inputs and a positive step towards better care for the land, and human health. At that stage, NASAA operated a ‘Level C’ certification, which we viewed as a ‘first stage’ conversion to organic, and which permitted a small amount of herbicide use. Level C only persisted until the early 1990’s.

Organic done properly is regenerative, and regenerative done well is, or should be, organic.