During a recent visit to the Netherlands, Roberto de Azevêdo, Director General of the World Trade Organisation heard that food producers striving to produce better products are facing an uphill struggle to compete with less-sustainable producers.

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De Azevêdo was on a mission to hear from representatives of the Dutch food sector – hailed as one of the nation's success stories – but amongst his meetings with the Dutch royal family, parliament and industry leaders, Volkert Engelsman from organic fruit and vegetable producers Eosta gave the WTO boss some food for thought. Engelsman said, "The main trade barriers do not lie at national frontiers. The main problem is a global issue: There is no level playing field for sustainable and non-sustainable producers, which leads to hidden trade barriers."

The Eosta boss said that while his conventional counterparts complained about non-tariff based trade barriers such as high standards for pesticide residues, the challenge faced by those attempting to produce food that is better for society and the environment is continuing to produce when the destructive practices of others are externalised. This is an argument frequently used by advocates of measures such as True Cost Accounting, who claim that under the present food system, the costs of impacts on the environment and public health from agriculture are not met by food producers, but by the public or the environment itself.

Although the approach is not without its critics, TCA advocates maintain that one result of the current value system has been the so-called 'organic premium' which has often been used by advocates of the status quo to dismiss sustainable agriculture as elitist and unaffordable.

Patrick Holden, of the UK's Sustainable Food Trust, has explained the situation in this way, "This economic system privileges unsustainable practices by redistributing the costs of their damaging impacts from the private sector to the public sector. So, for example, we pay for the cost of cleaning pesticide and fertilizer residues out of our water, in our water bill, when this cost should be more appropriately borne by the polluter."

Speaking in the Netherlands last month, Engelsman said, "The real problem is that ecological and social cost, for example as a consequence of pesticide use, are shifted on to our society and future generations. As long as importers and exporters get away with the lowest possible price as a result of killing soil, biodiversity and the climate, there is no level playing field."

Perhaps surprisingly, WTO's De Azevêdo acknowledged the problem and said that he is in favour of cutting tariffs on green products. However he asserted that WTO can only work at frontiers, and cannot influence issues that run across borders. Engelsman responded, "Externalised costs constitute a global barrier to sustainable trade, which is what the world really needs at this point in history. This should be a concern for the World Trade Organisation. Non-sustainable products are now competing unfairly with sustainable products."

Engelsman is an advocate of true cost accounting methods; his transparency initiative Nature & More, which aims to connect consumers with farmers by demonstrating the production methods used to produce food for Eosta across six continents, also aims to put a value on growers' efforts to achieve greater sustainability. This, Engelsman maintains, is to incorporate aspects like soil fertility, biodiversity and social justice into the economic value system.