The introduction of safe and sustainable agriculture certification : a case study of cherry growers in the Southern Interior of British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
GlobalGAP (previously EurepGAP) is a voluntary business-to-business standard for food audit that has recently achieved the greatest acceptance worldwide (Campbell, Lawrence & Smith 2006) boasting implementation numbers of over 80,000 farms in 80 countries. Compliance with the standard is verified by means of the third party certification (TPC) audit, and is designed to (GlobalGAP 2008) assure European retailers that exporting producers have met their criteria for safe and sustainable agriculture (GlobalGAP 2007b). In 2004, cherry growers in the Southern Interior of British Columbia became the first GlobalGAP certified producers in Canada. This novelty afforded a unique opportunity to observe the introduction of the standard in an industrialized country with well-established regulations and where the capacity of producers to undertake the process was relatively high. A qualitative methodology was used in case studies of two communities to inductively study the implementation of ‘safe and sustainable agriculture’ certification and generate relevant research questions for deeper examination. Sensitizing concepts emerging from observations of the TPC audits (n = 20) evolved into two primary research objectives; 1) to understand the practical application and diffusion of a TPC standard and 2) to explore the efficacy of the TPC standard as a mechanism to promote sustainable agriculture within certain pre-existing contexts. Forty-four follow up interviews were conducted with growers that chose to certify (n = 24), those that did not (n = 14), and other key actors (n = 3). This thesis examines the research objectives over three chapters. The introduction provides the local and global context along with a review of GlobalGAP, agri-food governance and the role of private certification and retailer power. Chapter two presents the technological and sociological factors that influenced the stages of the diffusion of GlobalGAP TPC and compares these factors and outcomes to the technological and sociological components of sustainable agriculture. In the conclusion, policy strategies are offered to maximize the potential for this tool to promote sustainable agriculture along with suggestions for future research on the topic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".