The Soil Association has welcomed the campaigning efforts of celebrity chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver to improve the welfare standards of chicken production.

Chicken Out! is a new campaign to help consumers to understand the conditions in which most table birds are reared and to put pressure on the industry to raise its standards.

A shift towards more ‘free range’ production would be a positive step forward. However it is still some way behind the Soil Association’s organic poultry standards, which ensure truly free range birds and offer the highest standards of animal welfare as acknowledged by respected animal welfare groups such as Compassion in World Farming.

Joyce d’Silva, of Compassion in World Farming said, "Organic farming has the potential to offer the very highest standards of animal welfare. We believe the Soil Association’s welfare standards are leaders in the field."

Natural Choices, the website which provides news on ethical and eco friendly living in the United Kingdom, says "intensively farmed chickens reared for meat can be housed in flocks 30 – 40,000 strong. Even the RSPCA’s Freedom Food standards allow 16,000 egg-laying birds per house, and there is no limit on flock size for free-range meat birds."

"In contrast, Soil Association organic standards recommend flock sizes of 500 - with absolute maximum flock sizes of 1,000 for meat birds and 2,000 for egg birds allowed only with special permission and additional management measures in place."

Report finds organic food provides no significant nutritional benefit compared with conventionally produced food.

Organic food is no healthier and provides no significant nutritional benefit compared with conventionally produced food, according to a new, independent study funded by the Food Standards Agency. But its conclusions have been called into question by experts and organic food campaigners.

The report looked at evidence published over the past 50 years of the different nutrient levels found in crops and livestock from both types of farming and also at the health benefits of eating organic food. The findings, partly published today in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, contradict previous work that has found organically grown food to be nutritionally superior.

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For millions of rural Indian women, organic agriculture offers escape from the three demons of debt, disease and destitution,says Bhavdep Kang, but despite all the evidence they have gained little support from government.

In an arid corner of Rajasthan, Anand Kanwar of Laporiya village recalls how, when she was an adolescent, the entire village would be decimated by drought. Crops would fail, cattle would die and people would have to migrate to cities in search of work.Today, thanks to a community-driven watershed management-cum-organic farming project implemented over 15 years, the village manages two crops a year and at least one crop even in a really bad drought year and maintains large herds of milking cattle. No one ever goes hungry or thirsty, she says.

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In 2007, the Soil Association launched a consultation on the compatibility of organic food and air freight.

It identified five options for the future: to continue using a system that allows air freight, to implement a total ban on air freight for all Soil Association certified products, to implement a selective ban that allows certain exceptions with clear local development benefits, to develop a labeling system or to take part in a carbon offsetting scheme.

In December 2008, the Soil Association published the outcomes of the two-stage consultation. The Soil Association Standards Board decided not to ban air-freighting but to monitor the amount of air freighted organic goods. They will continue to work with partners in Africa to promote the positive contribution organic farming makes to food security and people’s livelihoods.

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Whole Food Markets, the successful US ethical grocery chain, opened its first UK store on the High Street, Kensington in 2007. The supermarket sells ethical, organic food without packaging.

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There are concerns that the organic food movement has been hijacked by supermarkets intent on being seen to be green but which are in reality, misleading the consumer. Environmental damage and the real impacts of food miles and sourcing abroad are not being honestly addressed. Consumers must now discover that where food is sourced and how it has arrived on the supermarket shelf, can be just as important, environmentally speaking, as how it was produced in the first place.

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