Regional Experience Sharing Workshop: Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) to promote Agroecology in the Mekong Region

Today, millions of small farmers worldwide practice organic –and to a certain extent agroecological– farming without being certified. Many development practitioners and policymakers praise the advantages of such “organic by default” mode of production, characterized by the absence of chemical inputs, often due to a lack of financial means, rather than from a deliberate choice or from specific farming practices (Vogl et al., 2005). This simplistic view ignores the gigantic obstacle to market access that is third-party certification. Indeed, direct certification costs, tedious record-keeping and tiresome paper work preclude many of the smallest and poorest farmers from participating into a movement that could significantly increase their income. This in turn jeopardizes the growth of the organic movement as a whole
(IFOAM, 2017). 

Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) emerged over 40 years ago, as “locally focused quality assurance systems […] based on the active participation of stakeholders and built on a foundation of trust, social networks and knowledge exchange.” (IFOAM-Organics International,2008). In several European countries (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan) organic farmers were initially inspected by committees that involved farmers as well as retailers, processors and/or consumers (Sylvander, 1997). Later on, PGS were revived in Brazil (where alternatives to certification have been sought since the 1990s), India and Mexico (Fonseca et al., 2004; Khosla, 2006; Nelson et al. 2016). Today, PGS are recognized as a suitable alternative to third-party certification for smallholders for several reasons: 1/ the cost of participation is much lower, and mostly takes the form of voluntary time involvement rather than financial expenses (May, 2016); 2/ by developing trust and mutual understanding between farmers and other stakeholders, PGS help develop multi-stakeholder dialogue and collective learning processes (PGS is often characterized as “knowledge intensive”); 3/ as a result, PGS are powerful instruments to stimulate local market development as they play a key role in developing consumer confidence in local produce