Three different rulebooks, one word

The label says "organic" in Taipei, Brussels and Washington. The word is the same; the law behind it is not.

The regulations are national instruments, not a global standard

When a bag of high-mountain oolong from Alishan carries an organic mark, it has been certified under a specific legal framework — and which framework that is determines exactly what was checked, by whom, and against what list of permitted inputs. "Organic" is not a single international standard with local enforcers. It is a family of separate national and regional laws that happen to share a vocabulary.

The three most consequential frameworks for Taiwanese producers and the markets they supply are the European Union's organic regulation ↗, now consolidated under Regulation (EU) 2018/848 which came into full force in January 2022; the United States Department of Agriculture's National Organic Program, established under the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 and administered through the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service; and Taiwan's own Organic Agriculture Promotion Act, passed in May 2018 and the first legislation to unify the island's previously fragmented certification landscape under a single statute. Each is a legal instrument with its own definitions, its own permitted-substance list, its own approved certification bodies and its own consequences for non-compliance. A farm that satisfies one does not automatically satisfy the others.

What each framework actually requires — and where they diverge

The structural logic of all three systems is similar: a conversion period during which the land is managed to the standard but the crop may not yet be labelled organic, followed by annual inspection by an accredited certification body, supported by a traceability system that allows auditors to match volumes sold against inputs purchased and yields recorded. The surface similarity, however, conceals real differences.

The EU regulation applies to any product marketed as organic within the European single market, regardless of where it was produced. Imported goods must come from either a country recognised as having an equivalent system or a certification body specifically approved to certify against EU standards in third countries. The regulation covers not only prohibited inputs but also processing, labelling and even the layout of the organic logo. As of its 2022 revision, it tightened rules on acceptable residue levels found during official controls: a detection above a threshold triggers investigation and can lead to decertification, even if the operator cannot be shown to have deliberately applied a prohibited substance. The permitted-substance list for EU organic farming is maintained in Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2021/1165 and updated by the Commission; it includes copper compounds as fungicides at capped annual rates, a concession that has been periodically contested but retained.

The USDA National Organic Program works through a network of accredited certifiers — both public and private bodies — who are themselves audited by the USDA. The NOP's National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances governs what may and may not appear in certified organic production and handling, and it is maintained by the National Organic Standards Board, a fifteen-member federal advisory committee. One structural difference from the EU system is that the NOP explicitly separates crop production, livestock and handling into distinct programme areas, each with its own subsets of rules. Another is that the NOP does not automatically trigger decertification on residue detection: the question is whether the operator took steps to avoid contamination, which places emphasis on procedural compliance and documented intent rather than outcome alone.

Taiwan's Organic Agriculture Promotion Act of 2018 replaced earlier voluntary guidelines and scattered agency rules with a unified statute covering both organic and, separately, a transitional label for farms in conversion — a distinction not all markets make explicit. The Act designated the Council of Agriculture (restructured as the Ministry of Agriculture from August 2023) as the competent authority, and it established an accreditation regime for certification bodies operating on the island. Notably, the Act includes provisions specifically relevant to small-scale highland farming of the kind practised across Chiayi County and the Alishan National Scenic Area: it permits collective or group certification arrangements under certain conditions, which can reduce the administrative load on individual smallholders growing high-mountain oolong on plots that are often under one hectare.

Where the frameworks diverge most sharply is on the permitted-substance list and on what counts as adequate buffer protection against neighbouring conventional fields. The EU list and the NOP list overlap substantially but are not identical; a substance permitted under one may be restricted or absent under the other. Buffer zones — the uncultivated or differently managed strips that separate certified land from potential sources of contamination — are handled by general principle in the NOP and with more prescriptive expectation in the EU framework, though the practical implementation in both systems is left largely to the certifying body's judgement on the ground.

Equivalence: the mechanism that makes trade possible

None of this would allow international trade in certified organic products without equivalence arrangements — negotiated agreements between regulatory authorities that one jurisdiction's system produces outcomes substantially equivalent to the other's. Equivalence is not mutual recognition of every rule: it is a political and technical determination that the overall system of standards, oversight and enforcement achieves comparable integrity.

The United States and the European Union have operated a bilateral organic equivalence arrangement since 2012, though that arrangement has been the subject of ongoing review and was modified in 2023 to address gaps — particularly around the use of certain substances permitted in the US but not in the EU, and vice versa. Taiwan does not hold a blanket equivalence agreement with either the EU or the US; Taiwanese producers wishing to access those markets must instead be certified by a body specifically accredited to certify against EU or NOP standards, which means a farm in the Alishan growing area may carry two or three separate certificates simultaneously, each issued by a different certification body against a different rulebook, each requiring its own annual audit.

IFOAM — Organics International, the Bonn-based umbrella organisation — has worked for decades toward a global baseline standard, and its Family of Standards process attempts to define a common floor beneath which no member scheme should fall. But IFOAM membership and compliance with its norms do not create legal equivalence between national systems; they are a voluntary alignment, not a treaty obligation.

The practical consequence, for a reader standing in front of a shelf in Taipei or Lyon or Portland, is that the organic mark is always the mark of a specific system. The logo identifies which rulebook applied — the EU green leaf, the USDA Organic circle, Taiwan's own certification mark — and each of those logos is a shorthand for a particular set of inspections, a particular permitted-substance list, and a particular body that signed the certificate. What they share is the structure: conversion, annual audit, traceability, and a list of what is and is not allowed in. What differs is exactly where those lines are drawn.