and equivalence to what remain highly nationalized systems of
regulation and enforcement. Despite strong rhetoric concerning the
social and environmental responsibility credentials of standards
like GLOBALG.A.P. there is very little in this standard or in its inspection
and verification procedures to ensure such goals are met.
Social and environmental requirements within the GLOBALG.A.P.
standard centre largely on the production of risk assessments and
plans. Requirements to comply with more demanding national
legislation are effectively meaningless where state monitoring and
enforcement is weak given that certifying businesses are not
actually required to demonstrate legal compliance. By claiming to
stand for social responsibility while deferring to unenforced state
regulations, on the one hand, and simply ignoring critical issues
such as the legitimacy of land tenure, on the other, GLOBALG.A.P.
papers over significant regulatory failures and gaps.
While Rainforest Alliance standards are less problematic, it is
GLOBALG.A.P. standards that Philippine state agencies have been
directed to promote and against which local standards are benchmarked.
Even were National Interpretation Guidelines for GLOBALG.
A.P.’s voluntary GRASP modules available for the Philippines,
the regulatory gaps identified in this paper would remain unfilled.
Plantation banana plantations do not, in the main, perform badly in
relation to those matters addressed by GRASP (worker health,
safety and welfare). It is matters related to the long, violent and
continuing history of conflict over agricultural land use that remain
conspicuously absent.
It is not unreasonable in light of the Philippine experience to ask
just how much can be expected of standards in relation to complex
social and environmental issues? Indeed, it could be argued that
rationalized systems of monitoring and verification are necessarily
limited in scope; that they are suited to encouraging and verifying
compliance with a baseline set of reasonably universal expectations,
but that consideration of altogether more serious matters of
human rights and environmental justice belong to other political
spheres. To the extent that this is true, however, it must be
acknowledged that certification to standards such as GLOBALG.A.P.
stands for a very partial conception of responsibility and
sustainability.