Forget making halal labels mandatory!

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 04/09/2007 3:07 PM  |  Opinion

Ari A. Perdana, Jakarta

I once had lunch in the student cafeteria of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was located about 40 minutes from my place in the neighboring town of Cambridge. Brandeis is a university run by a Jewish organization.

Being a Jewish institution, the cafeteria of course served kosher meals. The Jewish rule, the strict one, prohibits kosher and non-kosher food from being processed together. Not only that, the cutlery must also be separately treated. At Brandeis, the cafeteria was divided into kosher and non-kosher sections. The cutlery for each section were marked with different colors

Although there was no visible separator for the two sections, you were not allowed to buy your meal from one section and eat it in the other one. Same thing applied for the cutlery. After you finished, you had to return your cutlery to different trays (and it was washed separately).

I chose the kosher side since it was the closest thing to Muslim halal food. Then I found out that it would cost me about a dollar more. I wondered why it should cost more. My guess was that it was because processing kosher food increases the production costs. The producers needs to manually slaughter the animal, meaning extra labor cost. Then there is another process to fully remove the blood from the meat. The producers may also need to have the food examined by some kind of religious council that will issue the kosher certificate, which means another extra cost.

More interestingly, what makes someone willing to pay more for the same meal made from kosher products over the non-kosher one? Except pork dishes, all meals served in the two sections were the same. Perhaps it is like an insurance premium: The extra amount that customers are willing to pay to get some degree of income certainty. Here, the extra dollar serves as the premium for one's religious preference. At most, it can be your ticket to heaven. At least you can escape from guilty feeling.

There is no free lunch. That applies for religiosity as well. Practicing our religious beliefs in consumption means that in some ways we become discriminatory customers. We only choose products that are made by specific producers or using certain procedures.

Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Gary Becker once said that if we are being discriminative, the market will punish us by limiting our choices, so we will have to pay a higher price. Note that the price is not always explicit. Sometimes the price may be in the form of ""searching cost"". We must travel a bit further to find a halal-certified butcher. Sometimes it is has no monetary value, but we may have to reject dinner invitations, or refrain from enjoying a delicious meal at a party because we are not sure whether the food served is halal.

But if we are religious, we won't mind paying more, right? And no one should mind our decision, providing that everything is based on voluntary choice, and the price paid is the result of voluntary exchange. The Brandeis cafeteria provides a good model for this.

You know the price, you are free to choose. Nobody can force you to choose any section, or prohibit you from eating in a certain section. Meanwhile, the university does not limit the customers' choice by prohibiting non-kosher food from being sold. At the same time, customers who demand kosher food are respected.

Substitute the word halal with vegetarian, sugar- or fat-free. The arrangement works exactly the same. Specific preference means limited choice, which in most cases also implies higher ""price."" So long as the customers are willing to pay the extra price, it won't matter. And so long as there is demand for the specific products, producers will keep supplying.

The next question is how do we know that the product is indeed halal (or sugar-free)? We can only trust the producers. But trust sometimes just isn't enough. That's why people invented certification.

Here in Indonesia, we have a halal certificate issued by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI). So far it has worked well. If you are a producer and concerned about your Muslim customers, you would want to have that certificate. Otherwise, you won't bother having one. If you are a customer who is concerned about the halal status of the thing that you eat, just look to see if it shows the halal label. Maybe you are not really concerned, or you think everybody can be trusted to sell halal products. In such cases, you don't make your selection based on the halal label.

What if you are a strict Muslim customer but don't think that the products around you are truly halal? It means you don't trust the market. Then look for the non-market solution: Stay at home, don't buy any products and prepare your own food. If you are creative enough, you might want to enter the market as producer, and advertise your product as ""genuinely halal.""

The other option is asking the MUI to improve the procedures surrounding issuing halal certification and increase its monitoring activities to ensure greater compliance. This is fine, as long as the decision to get a certificate remains optional.

Currently some people are thinking about another option: Making the halal certificate compulsory. MUI then will issue a fatwa that rules that products without the certificate are haram. For some reasons this option is problematic. First, it contradicts the Islamic principles that everything that God provides is halal unless mentioned otherwise. The MUI does not possess any authority to rule a product as haram simply because the product is not certified.

Second, compulsory certificate puts an extra burden on producers. It won't create problems for big producers or restaurants, but small businesses will be hurt.

Third, any certification process always provides room for corruption. Just because it involves the MUI, the process will not automatically be corruption-free.

In short, just forget this idea of making the halal certificate compulsory. Its mudharat (cost) far exceeds the benefit. Keep the system as it is now. The decision on consuming halal food must be respected, but it must also be a personal choice. This applies to all decisions based on religious preferences.

The writer is a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta, and a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (2004-2006). He can be reached at Ari_Perdana@csis.or.id.

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