New s
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Street Roots • August 4-10, 2017
Fighting
for organic
Legal battles behind the USDA label
aim to keep its integrity intact
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF W R IT E R
ngoing legal battles over the laws
governing the USDA Organic label
could be cause for concern among
consumers paying a premium price for
organic produce, meat and eggs.
These recent developments highlight the
growing influence “big organic” is having on
the way organic produce is cultivated and
farm animals are raised.
To carry the USDA Organic label, a
grower must go
S S g i - , , ,3,
through a certification
O
p ro c e ss and ro u tin e
inspections and adhere
to strict rules and
guidelines.
What consumers
might not know is that
those rules and
guidelines are subject
to change and might
not encompass all the
aspects of food
production they
WHAT THE LABEL MEANS
envision when they see
“organic” printed on a
product.
Areas currently in
flux include animal
welfare rules for
Organic: 95-99 percent organic
poultry and egg
production, the list of
synthetic chemicals
organic
allowed in organic
production, and the use
Some Organic Ingredients: means
of chemically-
contaminated compost
and manure in organic
Products with less than 95 percent
farming.
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“A lot of the major
a
food corporations are
moving as quickly as
they can into the
organic sector, if they
haven’t already,” George Kimbrell, legal
director at Center for Food Safety, told
fellow attorneys at a University of Oregon
School of Law conference in March.
At a panel discussion about the legal
battles over organic labels, he explained
that large parent companies overseeing
their offshoot organic brands often have a
different perspective than traditional
organic farmers.
In some cases, large-scale egg and meat
■
producers replaced GMO feed with organic
feed and stopped using hormones and
antibiotics, but otherwise kept their factory-
farm production methods in place and
slapped an organic label on it.
The spirit of organic was birthed out of
the movement sparked by Rachel Carson’s
1962 book, “Silent Spring,” about the
synthetic pesticide DDT. Organic was built
on an ethos of sustainable, regenerative
farming that food safety advocates think
some larger organic producers are failing to
fully embrace.
Oregon has a long history of organic
farming, leading the way in 1973 when it
became the first state to implement organic
certification.
By 1990, 22 states had established their
own certifications. That same year, the
Organic Food Production Act created the
National Organics Standards Board to advise
the USDA on organic policy to be regulated
by the National Organic Program.
But establishing just what that USDA
Organic label would mean was a long and
arduous process. It took 10 years for the
board to hash out the standards that would
govern the label, and even today seafood is
excluded and rules regarding animal welfare
are sparse.
The USDA Organic label was designed
with a strong public component in place,
with any new rules subject to a transparent
public process.
“The first proposed rules in 1997
shocked a lot of people because they would
have allowed in organic the use of genetic
engineering, irradiation and sewage sludge
as fertilizer,” Kimbrell said.
Those initial proposed rules resulted in
275,000 public comments. In the end, the
label prohibited all three of those practices.
Kimbrell and attorney Amy van Saun
have been working out of the Center for
Food Safety’s Portland office on several
cases aimed at maintaining transparency in
the USDA Organic label.
The nonprofit law firm and sustainable-
food advocacy group is based in Washington,
D.C., with offices in San Francisco and
Honolulu, as well.
“People should be concerned about the
integrity of organic, and we need to be
watchdogging and making sure that USDA
isn’t bowing to big organic and letting them
bend the rules and get away from what it’s
really meant to be,” van Saun told Street
Roots.
Does organic mean humane
treatment of animals?
Earlier this year, a Consumer Reports
survey found 86 percent of regular organic
consumers want animal products from
farms that treat animals humanely.
While standards for pasture-raising
ruminant animals such as cows and sheep
have been implemented under the organic
label, living-condition requirements for
poultry, eggs and pork are absent.
That was supposed to change for poultry
in May when a new set of rules requiring
real outdoor access for birds and limits on
overcrowding would have taken effect.
The rules were approved the day before
the Trump administration took power, but
the president s executive order freezing
new regulations has delayed
implementation.
While the majority of U.S. producers are
fine with the new rules and are already
See ORGANIC, page 5
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