Chicago Tribune Covers Organic Standards Controversy

original

Chicago Tribune Covers Organic Standards Controversy

Posted on Fri, Dec. 09, 2005

The organic label just won't stick if feds keep this up

BY JULIE DEARDORFF
Chicago Tribune
http://www.fortwayne.com

Whenever I see the green and white "USDA Organic" label on food, I make two
assumptions: The product will cost a fortune, and it won't contain
artificial or synthetic ingredients.

But organics often do contain a small percentage of additives. And thanks to
a last-minute amendment slipped into an agricultural spending bill without
public discussion or debate, the standards for what constitutes "organic"
could be diluted even more than they already are.

After "organic" was finally defined and national standards were hammered out
in 2002, a product could use the two-tone "USDA Organic" label if at least
95 percent of its ingredients are organic. The remaining 5 percent could be
artificial or synthetic if they were on an approved list and the necessary
organic ingredients were unavailable or in short supply.

This infuriated Arthur Harvey, an organic-blueberry farmer from Maine, who
sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture, charging that the standards were
too lax. Earlier this year, he won, meaning that food labeled "USDA Organic"
would not be able to contain any artificial ingredients. The ruling also
meant that several dozen approved synthetic substances used since 2002 would
be banned, additives such as pectin, a thickening agent used in jam and
yogurt, and ethylene, used to accelerate the ripening of harvested fruit.

But the controversial rider, part of the 2006 agricultural appropriations
bill, changes the picture in two important ways: First, it weakens organic
standards because it reverses the Harvey court decision that banned the use
of synthetics. Worse, it gives the agriculture secretary the power to
approve new synthetic substances if no organic substitute is available,
without getting a review from the National Organic Standards Board advisory
group.

This means hundreds of new chemically derived processing ingredients could
appear in food labeled "USDA Organic" without any public discussion. The
Organic Consumers Association says industry already has requested that 517
more synthetics be approved, including some called "food-contact substances"
such as boiler additives and disinfectants.
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complete article here

I understand not only the reason organic foods are relatively expensive -- organic agriculture is by definition labor-intensive -- but also the dire threat posed to organic agriculture by agribusiness, which wants to afix the "USDA Organic" label to products grown and/or processed by conventional methods and thereby (without any justification save corporate greed) charge prices that are 100-300 percent higher. In other words, what this article protests is an attempt to set the stage for the same kind of obscene profiteering we see in the petroleum and energy industries: once again, proof of the tyrannosauric savagery that is the quintessential core of capitalism.

Because corporate control of public education and mass media has left the American public abysmally ignorant of what organic agriculture is and what it means both in terms of saving the global ecosystem and restoring (not just preserving) human health, adequate public debate over this issue has become impossible. Indeed -- even living as I do in an area that is presumably environmentally "enlightened" -- the public ignorance of organic agriculture is so great (and the official effort to maintain that ignorance so overwhelmingly successful) it is a safe assumption that the only people who understand organic agriculture are those who practice it.

Suffice it to say therefore that merely on the basis of flavorfulness alone, organically grown vegetables are infinitely superior to the increasingly tasteless dreck produced by conventional agribusiness methods from ever more depleted (and therefore ever more toxic) soils. The health advantages of organically grown foods (both in terms of real nutritional value and the absence of toxic or carcinogenic compounds) are recognized in conventional wisdom but -- again because of corporate censorship -- have never been quantified. But think of it this way: which would you rather eat? Vegetables forced from a chemical miasma merely to make the greatest profit possible (and the consumers' health be damned)? Or vegetables grown in carefully nurtured soil to be the tastiest and most healthy foods possible?

(My own experience at organic gardening, 1986 through 2004, yielded annual subsistence crops of vegetables that I valued -- based on local prices -- at approximately $1000 per year. This provided me with all my vegetables save root crops, which after a few unsuccessful experiments I stopped trying to grow because my native soil, though otherwise very rich, contained too much clay. Alas, that chapter of my life is closed forever: I was ousted from the country in 2004 by the increasingly impossible cost of rural living, and given that I am in my 60s it is obvious I will not ever be able to make enough money to move back. Nor -- ironically -- can I afford the cost of buying organic produce in the supermarket, which means that after 18 years of relatively healthy eating I have now been condemned to that most American form of capitalist euthanasia: slowly poisoning myself by eating conventionally grown vegetables that are by definition increasingly saturated with toxics.)