Intro to US Organic Certification Standards

The organic movement may prove to be a victim of its own success.  The growth of the organic annual retail sales to over $21 billion (1) has lured corporate giants such as Dean Foods, Coca-Cola and Cargill to acquiring organic brands as well as producing their own organic food and beverage products.  In an effort to keep production costs low, large corporate food companies tend to utilize mass production methods, such as CAFOs, which run counter to the philosophies that started the organic movement and aided the resurgence of small family farms in the U.S.  Now that these methods are being used to produce organic products on a large scale, to satisfy the needs of retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Costco, concerns are being raised regarding not only the quality of the organic food produced by these corporations but also the effect it may have on the small organic operations that helped begin the fastest growing food trend in America.

 

The approach that the USDA has taken to certify a product as organic is process based and may leave consumers vulnerable to substandard organic food and beverages
.  Organic certification agents, who are paid by the manufacturers that they evaluate, base their assessments on the procedures and ingredients that the manufacturer or producer has disclosed.  This approach does not rely on any product testing which leaves the consumer unprotected against accidental or unscrupulous contamination of products labeled as organic.  Winds carrying conventional seeds or pesticides from neighboring farms and ingredients that may themselves been accidentally contaminated with synthetic products are examples of how the process based certification method can allow products containing non organic ingredients to reach consumers.  The process based method also leaves consumer vulnerable to unscrupulous producers who can hide the use of synthetic ingredients with virtually no possibility of the certification agent or the USDA discovering their fraudulent actions against consumers.

In Title 21 of the 1990 Farm Bill, Congress passed the Organic Food Production Act (OFPA), in order to establish uniform national standards for the production and handling of foods labeled as “organic”. (2)  Products meeting these standards may be labeled as “organic” and bear a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) seal. 

The Act authorized a new USDA National Organic Program (NOP) to set national standards for the production, handling, and processing of organically grown agricultural products. In addition, the Program oversees mandatory certification of organic production.

The OFPA required the USDA Secretary to establish a National Organic Standards Board (NOSB).  According to the Department of Agriculture the NOSB, comprised of 15 individuals with specified backgrounds, fulfills three important roles; as the primary linkage to the organic community the Board must advise the NOP on the implementation of the OFPA, approve all acceptable synthetic materials which appear on the National List, and protect and defend the integrity of organic standards. (3)

The OFPA also required the Secretary of the USDA to create regulations implementing the Act. The Secretary of Agriculture, Daniel Robert Glickman, published the National Organic Program Final Rule (Final Rule) in December 2000 detailing the Departments regulations of organic certification.  

(1)  Dimitri, Carolyn, and Lydia Oberholtzer. "Marketing U.S. Organic Foods: Recent Trends from Farms to Consumers." USDA Economic Research Service Report  Bulletin 58 (2009): n. pag. United States Department of Agriculture. Web. 18 July 2011. http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib58/eib58.pdf 

(2)  Gold, Mary V. "Organic Production and Organic Food: Information Access Tools." National Agricultural Library. United States Department of Agriculture, June 2007. Web. 19 July 2011. http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/ofp/ofp.shtml.

(3) Id.