First the Vegan-Carne Alliance, and now the Vegan World Alliance. I think Alliances are the new thing.
The Dutch Association for Veganism, Vegan Australia, Vegan Society of Aotearoa New Zealand, and Vegan Society of Canada came together to address worldwide challenges and share initiatives to fulfill their individual and collective missions.
I’m assuming partnerships like this have happened before, but I especially am interested in this bit:
Its first project is to create a uniform certification system for vegan food products.
This problem is not unique. It’s tricky labeling thing and giving certification. You can see this the confusion mostly clearly in how they label eggs — and most people not knowing the difference between cage-free and pasture-raised. I think most people assume the former means the latter.
Maybe a better analog would be Jewish certifications of Kosher. Veganism is often akin to religious thinking with stringent devotion and oftentimes fairly vocal folks involved—so I think there is definitely some cross-over. And often the generalities of what people consider “vegan” varies person-to-person. Veganism will likely need some variants to properly help someone buying keep to their ethical system. There will likely be wedge issues, like gelatin from non-kosher animals for Jews. Here’s a small bit from a write-up on My Jewish Learning about Kosher Symbols:
“While there have been some lenient opinions over the centuries regarding gelatin,” Rabbi Lopatin said, “current Orthodox practice, at least in the Diaspora, is to not accept gelatin from non-kosher animals. Therefore, supervisions which do accept the leniencies of gelatin from non-kosher animals are not acceptable to (Orthodox) community standards.” And once you have an organization that allows for gelatin from a non-kosher animal, the community might be nervous accepting that organization’s supervision on any food, even if it doesn’t contain gelatin.