by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
After controversy surrounding Apeel — a Gates-funded synthetic fungicide and fruit coating — sparked concern over how chemicals are approved in organic products, agribusiness watchdog OrganicEye this week demanded the U.S. Department of Agriculture break Big Food’s stranglehold on the process for approving certified organic foods.
Agribusiness watchdog OrganicEye this week petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to establish formal regulatory oversight for the public and private organizations that determine what products can be labeled organic.
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The request comes after a recent social media controversy surrounding a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded synthetic fungicide and fruit coating — Apeel — sparked public debate about potentially dangerous synthetic products and herbicides that make it into the food system under the “organic” label.
“The conflicts of interest in this process are mind-boggling,” said Mark Kastel, executive director of Wisconsin-based OrganicEye. “It’s time for the USDA to change direction to comply with the intent of Congress and save the value of the organic label for ethical farmers and their loyal customers.”
Since Congress created the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) in the 1990s to recommend industry standards for regulating organic food production and processing under the National Organic Program, the board increasingly has become dominated by members of the Organic Trade Association (OTA), the most powerful industry lobbying group, Kastel told The Defender.
Once the industry-dominated NOSB recommends guidelines for approving products for use in the organic production process, a different organization — an industry-led and funded nonprofit, the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) — is responsible for reviewing newly branded and formulated food ingredients and agricultural inputs containing those products.
OMRI, which gets most of its funding from the fees it collects from the corporations applying for product approval, is responsible for approving products like Apeel’s organic line, Organipeel, for public consumption.
Along with its letter to the USDA demanding regulatory reform, OrganicEye launched a public campaign to pressure the Biden administration to reduce its dependence on political appointees from corporate agribusiness in organic regulatory oversight.
“Over the last 20 years I’ve learned these people only react to pressure — public pressure, political and media pressure,” Kastel told The Defender. “They don’t do the right thing because it’s the right thing. They do the right thing in damage control.”
Organic agencies captured by Big Ag
The existing regulatory structure grew out of the need in the 1980s to standardize how organic food was produced in order to protect farmers and consumers, Kastel said.
In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act, which, among other things, created the NOSB to serve as a buffer organization between corporate lobbyists and rulemakers.
The NOSB was designed as a public-private partnership — a 15-member panel with dedicated seats for different stakeholders — that set recommendations for different aspects of the organic industry with a mandate to act in the interests of farmers and consumers.
But under the leadership of Tom Vilsack, secretary of agriculture during the Obama administration and a former million-dollar-a-year agribusiness lobbyist, the USDA began filling seats originally meant for farmers with agribusiness employees.
Today, 80% of the NOSB members are either members of the OTA lobbying group or they work for members of the group, according to research by OrganicEye.
Under Vilsack, the NOSB also was stripped of its ability to set its own agenda. It’s supposed to work independently, but as small organic farmers have been bought up by large conventional ag conglomerates, the corporate dominance over the NOSB also has grown and organic standards have been watered down to benefit the largest of these corporate “organic” producers, Mercola reported.
Kastel also told The Defender that because the organic industry is heavily dominated by Big Food giants such as General Mills or Perdue Farms, whose primary market is conventional food — rather than by small producers concerned with ecology — there is a constant pressure to “try to change the working definition of organic.”
Their goal, he said, is to make organic agriculture, “as close to conventional agriculture as possible so they have to change their practices of growing food or processing food as little as possible.”
It’s in that spirit that today, the corporate-dominated NOSB creates standards for organic production, Kastel said.
When companies create new inputs or products containing NOSB-approved ingredients to sell to organic producers and consumers, a certifying agent or Material Review Organization (MRO) must verify the product complies with the organic regulations set by the NOSB or relevant laws.
OMRI is one of the key MROs.
For example, a company like Apeel, whose Organipeel contains citric acid — which is on the NOSB list of approved products — as an active ingredient, would submit its product to OMRI for approval and pay OMRI a fee for the approval process.
According to OMRI’s most recent IRS filings, the nonprofit organization, which operates as a public charity, exceeded $7 million in revenue last year, which came mostly from industry fees, OrganicEye reported.
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