Fear and Loathing Over
Federal Organic Regulations

The federal government will soon release long-awaited national standards for organic produce. Far from being pleased, organic activists fear that the federal standard could be the kiss of death for many organic farmers.

The new rules "will likely send shockwaves throughout the natural food community," said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Pure Food Campaign, and Ben Lilliston, of a Chicago-based environmental education group called Sustain, in an analysis of the proposed federal regulations posted on the campaign’s Web site in July. "The USDA and politicians seem hell-bent on destroying the alternative food system which we have so laboriously built up over the last 30 years."

The chief fear is that the USDA, long a champion of conventional farming techniques disdained by organic growers, will promulgate dangerously diluted standards. The weak federal regulations will enable massive corporate farms, using objectionable farming practices, to label their produce organic, the USDA’s critics assert. With their large-scale production, the "factory farmers" will undersell the small organic growers who have painstakingly created the market for organic food.

Once an insignificant affectation of the countercultural fringe, organic food is now a big, burgeoning business in the United States. Since 1990, sales of organic food have jumped 20 percent a year, reaching $3.3 billion in 1996, and are on a trajectory to reach $6.5 billion by the year 2000, according to an annual survey by Natural Foods Merchandiser magazine. Sales of organic dairy products have been doubling each year. And the total acreage of organic cropland has more than doubled since 1991.

To date, promulgation and enforcement of organic standards has been left to the states and to private certifiers, such as California Certified Organic Farmers, one of the largest in the nation, with about 600 farmers and another 100 processors and handlers carrying its seal of approval.

The USDA will attempt to standardize the system with the new regulations, which are scheduled to be released this fall. The regulations have been in the works since the Organic Food Production Act was signed into law in 1990, calling on the USDA to draw up regulations and to create a National Organic Standards Board to advice the department during the regulation-writing process.

The NOSB has turned out to be something of a gadfly within the USDA, regularly taking purist-organic positions that the department rejects. For example, the NOSB passed a resolution in September 1996 recommending that "the class of genetically-engineered organisms and their derivatives be prohibited in organic production and handling systems."

But the USDA now appears set to disregard the NOSB’s call for an explicit ban on genetically engineered food. The new regulations reportedly will allow individual genetically engineered products to be judged on a "case-by-case" basis.

Such a provision would be "a Trojan Horse effect" that would lead to other proposals weakening the standards, Cummins and Lilliston wrote.

Besides the provision on genetic engineering, another highly controversial proposed regulation would allow meat, eggs, dairy, and other animal products to be labeled "organic," even if the animals have been kept in intensive confinement, a proposal that has outraged humane farming advocates.

Many state organic regulations, including California’s, are tougher than the federal regulations are likely to be. But the USDA may actually make it illegal for regional or non-governmental organic certification bodies to uphold organic standards stricter than U.S. government standards, according to Cummins and Lilliston.

Kenneth McCormick, a spokesman for CCOF, one of the most stringent certification organizations, said the group supports the federal law that has given rise to the regulations. He said he couldn’t comment more specifically until the regulations are finally released.

McCormick added that the new rules would have one major effect, irrespective of the details. Every farmer selling organic produce from now on will have to be certified and inspected at least once a year. At present, farmers in California can sell their produce with an organic label by simply registering with the state. The state organic registration system in California has never involved a mandatory inspection, though this year state regulators began a program of spot inspections of a limited number of farms.