Conscious Choice: Organic Label Debate

December 2005 | Choice Eating

Organic Label Debate

By CC Staff

Three years ago, when an organic blueberry farmer from Maine sued the U.S. government for allowing products with synthetic ingredients to be sold as organic, he set off a tumultuous debate that has recently come to a head.

Should small amounts of non-organic ingredients, such as vitamins, spices, citric acid and even carbonation, be allowed in food bearing the “USDA Organic” seal?

No, insisted consumer groups that chose to deluge Washington with letters. Yes, insisted members of the Organic Trade Association, claiming that more stringent organic standards would put many food processors and dairy farmers at risk — because their products could no longer be considered organic.

The government defines organic as grown without pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones or genetic engineering. The organic industry has just 2 percent of food and beverage sales, but due to consumer demand, the market is growing rapidly at a 20 percent rate. It also has attracted several large food concerns.

Sales for 2005 are expected to equal $14.5 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association. And USDA Organic labeling has evolved into a sort of gold standard that consumers have begun to recognize.

Labels include a “100 percent organic” category (fresh and processed products) as well as the “organic category” (95 percent or more organic ingredients), and the “made with organic” category (70 percent or more organic ingredients).

After an appeals court sided with the blueberry farmer and decided earlier this year that small amounts of non-organic ingredients should not be included in food labeled as organic, lawmakers decided to override the ruling and restore previous standards.

The Organic Trade Association (OTA) applauded the lawmakers’ amendment, saying that “the U.S. organic standards have always allowed specific synthetic materials that are essential to making numerous organic processed products. These are non-agricultural materials, including items such as baking powder and a type of pectin that are necessary in certain production and processing practices and have been used in producing foods for decades.”

Also included were substances necessary for maintaining healthful conditions for products, such as hydrogen peroxide, which is used to sanitize plastic milk cartons.

“If Congress had not acted, many of the organic products consumers know and love would have disappeared,” said Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of OTA.

Conversely, the Organic Consumers Association insisted the amendment weakened organic standards by allowing, among other things, numerous synthetic food additives and processing aids, including over 500 food contact substances, to be used in organic foods without public view.

The synthetic additives provision also drew the ire of Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), who blasted the entire amendment. In a news release, he called its passage “profoundly undemocratic and the end result is a serious setback for the multibillion dollar alternative food and farming system that the organic community has so painstakingly built up over the past 35 years.”

Other controversial provisions include allowing young dairy cows to continue to be treated with antibiotics and fed genetically engineered feed prior to being converted to organic production, and allowing loopholes under which non-organic ingredients could be substituted for organic ingredients without any notification of the public, based on “emergency decrees.”

Cummins said OCA will work to reverse the measure by pushing for an “Organic Restoration Act” in Congress in 2006.

Visit ota.com and organicconsumers.org.

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