by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
Since the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed standards for organic foods to be certified as “organic” by the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) in 2002, the quality of organic food sold in the U.S. has been rapidly declining, as the major food corporations that control most of the nation’s food supply have continually applied pressure to the USDA to lower those organic standards so that they could capitalize on consumer demand for “certified organic” food, while still mass producing their food the same way they produce conventional (non-organic) foods.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
This is a topic I have covered on Health Impact News for over a decade now. See some of our previous coverage:
USDA Takes Over Organic Program Eroding Organic Standards to Benefit Big Food
Organic Milk No Longer Organic: Factory Farms Take Over Organic Dairy and Drive Small Farms Out of Business
America’s Fraudulent Organics Industry: 40% of All Organic Food Tested Positive for Prohibited Pesticides
We Can No Longer Rely on USDA Organic Standards
Missouri Farmer Who Ran Largest Organic Food Fraud Scheme in U.S. History Takes Own Life Instead of Reporting to Prison
Philip Howard, a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and a professor at Michigan State University, has tracked the takeover of small, organic businesses, by corporate food since 2003, and his latest graphic image showing this consolidation updated in 2020 is the feature image of this article above.
Organic Processing Industry Structure 2020
I put together the first version of this graphic in 2003, approximately a year after the USDAs national organic standard was phased in.
This national standard helped to catalyze scores of acquisitions of pioneering organic brands by larger food processors and venture capitalists.
These trends have only intensified, to the point that nearly all of the 30 largest processors in North America have acquired organic brands. (Full Report.)
My company, Healthy Traditions, stopped certifying our own products as USDA certified organic in 2014, after we learned that most of the certified organic American grains we were selling were all contaminated with the toxic herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp. See:
ALERT: Certified Organic Food Grown in U.S. Found Contaminated with Glyphosate Herbicide
We then began developing our own standards for food we sold, where we started testing EVERY FOOD we sell in our store for glyphosate, as well as testing any product that has a genetically modified equivalent product approved to be sold in the U.S. market for the presence of GMO DNA.
Our own internal certification program is for “Traditionally Produced” foods.
Unfortunately, things have only become worse here in 2024 for the USDA certified organic program, in terms of consolidating power for the industry for Corporate Big Food.
Until this year, we still sold certified organic products from other suppliers, including some of the food that we import from other countries.
For example, while we no longer pay for the USDA organic certification for our signature product, our Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil that is made by small-scale producers in the Philippines, we have imported a mass-produced high quality certified organic coconut oil from the Philippines for years.
But in our last shipment from the Philippines that included some of this “organic” coconut oil, the FDA changed the standards for importing certified organic products, and implemented those new standards AFTER our container left Manila.
The new import standards required us, as the importer and handler, to also be certified organic, laying another expensive, bureaucratic layer to the USDA certified organic program that benefits large corporations, while eliminating competition from smaller companies.
It took us weeks to get our shipment out of customs, following calls to our Congressional officials in Washington D.C. to intervene for us.
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