" Organic" with a corporate twist
by Joel Bleifuss
In These Times magazine, February 1998
The Department of Agriculture wants to label sludge, bioengineering
and irradiation "organic"
This may be the future life of an "organic" piece
of meat: | A male calf is born, castrated and, for two years,
lives l on a Texas range, feeding on grass that has been "fertilized"
with sewage sludge from New York City. The grown steer is then
shipped to a feed lot and jammed in a pen. While there, he gets
sick and is injected with a variety of antibiotics. Meanwhile,
he fattens up on Purina cattle feed, made from Monsanto's genetically
engineered grains and supplemented with animal protein that was
rendered from the carcasses of diseased animals. He is eventually
sent to the abattoir to be slaughtered. Then, the meat is irradiated,
packaged and shipped to Chicago, where it is sold under the label,
"Meets USDA Organic Requirements."
Such a scenario could happen thanks to the National Organic
Program that was recently proposed by the Department of Agriculture
(USDA) to define what food can be marketed under the label "organic"
and what cannot. In an effort to accommodate corporate agribusiness,
the White House is permitting a number of agricultural practices,
all of them dubious and none of them natural, to be counted as
organic.
The organic foods movement, which began in the '40s, bloomed
when the '60s counterculture questioned the value of industrialized
food production and sought out "natural" alternatives
to pesticides, artificial colors and other chemicals. In the '80s,
interest in personal health, concern about pesticides and the
development of a silver palate among the upper middle class expanded
the natural foods market. Sales of organic foods have increased
from $1 billion in 1990 to $3.5 billion in 1996. Organic foods
now make up about 1 percent of total food sales.
But the hodgepodge of state and private standards governing
the market still makes it difficult for consumers to tell whether
food labeled organic is actually natural or for producers to know
what farming techniques are legitimate. So in 1990, producers
of organic foods, with help from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), successfully
lobbied Congress to pass th
Organic Foods Production Act. The act created the National
Organic Standards Board (NOSB) and charged it with drawing up
a definition of organic that would suit consumers, producers and
retailers of organic foods.
After four years of hearings, the NOSB drafted a standard
and presented it to the USDA in September 1996. The board based
its recommendations on the organic farming principle that crops
should be grown and livestock raised as close to the way nature
intended as possible. The NOSB said that organic farmers could
not use synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizers or growth hormones,
nor could they extend the shelf-life of their produce with chemical
stabilizers and preservatives.
Then, the White House stepped in. In order to make the regulations
more palatable to corporate interests, the Office of Management
and Budget and the USDA reworked key provisions of the NOSB proposal.
By the time that Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman released
the USDA's version on December 15, the distinction between organic
and non organic foods had been rendered almost meaningless. The
organic industry, angered by this betrayal, is fighting back.
It has until March 16 to make the case to the administration that
the original standards were better.
Glickman changed the NOSB recommendations in five crucial
ways. First, honoring a request from Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) Assistant Administrator Robert Perciasepe, Glickman
proposed that fertilizer made from municipal sewage sludge become
an acceptable part of organic agriculture. The NOSB had defined
sludge as unacceptable "synthetic" material, because
unlike traditional manure, sludge contains concentrated household
and industrial waste, including pesticides, PCBs, a host of pathogens
and heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic.
Second, the USDA offered the organic label to plant and animal
products created through bioengineering. The Department of Agriculture,
which strongly backs genetically engineered foods, explains in
a fact-sheet that "the policy of the
United States Government is that genetically engineered organisms
and their products should be regulated on risk, not on how they
are produced." The principal corporate beneficiary of the
change is Monsanto, the chemical company that is the leading player
in the bioengineering business.
Third' the USDA provided a sop to giant food processors, the
nuclear industry and the Department of Energy by opening up the
question of whether irradiation can be used to sterilize "organic"
foods. The USDA, piggy-backing on the Food and Drug Administration's
December decision to approve irradiated meat, is willing to make
irradiation a standard organic practice. Natural foods advocates
note that irradiation can produce dangerous "radiolytic products"
like benzene and formaldehyde and destroy a variety of vitamins.
For these reasons, the NOSB had recommended banning the use of
gamma rays to sterilize organic food.
Fourth, the Department of z Agriculture's definition of 2
organic allows farmers to feed rendered animal protein back to
other animals in ~ the form of protein feed a, supplements. This
practice 3 caused the mad cow epidemic in Britain and the emergence
of a human counterpart, a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,
which has so far claimed 23 lives. And it's not only dangerous,
but unnatural as well: The animals we eat are herbivores. Under
the regulations as currently formulated by the USDA, the daily
feed ration of an animal headed to the organic foods market can
contain up to 20 percent non organic feed material.
Finally, the USDA's proposed standards undermine a hallmark
of the natural foods movement, the idea that animals should live
a natural life prior to slaughter. While the department's proposed
recommendations make a gesture in that direction, requiring that
"all organically managed animals would have to have access
to health-promoting living conditions," the language is vague
and lacking in specifics. Michael Sligh, the former chair of the
NOSB, says, "The USDA left so many exemptions you could drive
a Tyson's truck through it. You don't even have to provide access
to the outdoors and sunlight." Further, the department's
recommendations permit the use of antibiotics in organic meat
production if the animal is sick. Both of these measures accommodate
the factory farming industry, where mega-operations depend on
keeping the animals tightly confined (and therefore prone to illness)
and constantly dosed up with antibiotics.
The Clinton administration will not have an easy time getting
the natural foods movement to swallow this concoction. Pure Food
Campaign has launched an "SOS" (Save Organic Standards)
campaign. And the Organic Trade Association, an association of
organic producers and retailers that helped to start the regulatory
process, is outraged. "These practices have never been part
of organic agriculture, and we will fight to keep them out of
the final regulations," says Katherine DiMatteo, the group's
executive director.
Fortunately, the natural foods movement is stronger now than
it was 16 years ago, when government quashed another attempt to
develop a blueprint for organic agriculture. During the Carter
administration, the USDA investigated organic agriculture and
determined that it was commercially feasible. Then in 1982, the
Reagan administration shut down the USDA's Sustainable Agriculture
Research and Education Program, which had been established to
promote those findings.
Abby Rockefeller, a longtime organic gardener and one of the
founders of the National Sludge Alliance in Copake, N.Y., says
that a good definition of organic could help educate the public
about the hazards of certain corporate farming techniques. "A
uniform organic standard, if it were good, would become a wedge
between safe, organic food and not safe, not-organic food,"
she says. But agribusiness giants don't want any regulations that
might make consumers doubt the safety of their products. Indeed,
the USDA's proposal allows corporate agriculture to win twice:
Not only does it gain a share of the organic foods market, but
it protects its high-tech food production operations from the
stigma of being called "unnatural."
Until March 16, the USDA will accept public comments on the
proposed regulations by letter, fax, e-mail and via the USDA Web
site (www.ams.usda.gov/nop). Already, the site has received more
than 1,000 comments, virtually all in opposition to the USDA's
changes. Next fall, the USDA is expected to release its final
version, which must then be approved by Congress.
The USDA's final standard will ultimately have international
repercussions. The World Trade Organization and the United Nations,
under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization in
Rome, are now developing international organic standards. These
bodies are sure to take the USDA's new regulations into consideration
when they write the world's rules. And that worries the EPA's
Hugh Kaufman. "Once these regulations get promulgated, the
marketing power will be lost for safer food," he says. "That
will speed up the continuing degradation of the food supply."
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