Spoil Association? Time to fight back on food miles

As was reported in an excellent article in The Times last week, the Soil Association – the UK’s leading organic organization – is seriously considering removing its organic certification from African farms because their produce is imported into the UK by air.

On the back of flimsy data and spurious logic (see my last blog on this subject), the Soil Association could single handedly ruin the livelihoods of tens of thousands of poor people in Kenya alone. And for millions of farmers across Africa, exporting their produce to markets like the UK offers one of the best prospects for escaping poverty.

If the Soil Association goes ahead, it would be appalling. And it’s about time we said so.