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Embattled Organic Sector Worries About Regulation
WASHINGTON - California farmer Tom Willey was first attracted to organic farming 21 years ago after noticing how many chemicals he was using in conventional farming.
A worker picks some New Zealand spinach growing in a greenhouse at an organic farm located on the outskirts of Beijing June 20, 2008. (REUTERS/David Gray) As a certified organic farmer selling everything from artichokes to zucchinis from his 75-acre farm in the San Joaquin Valley in California, Willey has become a respected pioneer in the organic farming community.
But now with the deep recession in the United States, farmers such as Willey are worried about the future of organic farming that grew sharply during the boom times.
The industry, which prides itself on delivering wholesome and safe products, also is worried and even a little angry about new food safety rules emanating from Washington.
"There is a lot of transparency in the organic food system and we've had it in place for several decades and we do so willingly," said Willey. "The lack of that is what characterizes industrial producers."
The global market for organic food has grown sharply over the past decade, with the United States accounting for about 45 percent of the global share.
Sales of organic food have soared from $1 billion in 1990 to an estimated $20 billion in 2007 and by 2006 became the fastest growing sector in the industry, according to the Organic Trade Association.
But now growth is coming to a halt as Americans tighten their purse strings and opt for cheaper alternatives.
"Millions of people who were occasionally buying organic products have cut back to save money and we're seeing the real decrease in growth in the last nine months," said Ronnie Cummins, the national director of the Organic Consumers Association.
Whole Foods Market Inc, a chain that sells organic and luxury grocery items, reported in May that quarterly sales fell nearly 5 percent from its stores opened at least one year. Profits also fell but the company said it avoided going into the red by cutting prices to keep consumers coming back.
Neil Currie, an UBS analyst said consumers are seeking lower prices and staying clear from luxury food products.
"Organic food comes at a premium price and Whole Foods sales have been quite negative," said Currie.
Growth in the organic sector dwindled to 12.5 percent last year compared to the 20 percent it used to enjoy.
"We might not see that kind of growth again," said Cummins.
An added worry for organic farmers is a new food safety legislation that passed last month in the Energy and Commerce committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that would be the most sweeping reform of the food safety system in close to 50 years.
The U.S. food supply system has been battered by a series of food recalls -- covering a range of products including lettuce, spinach, peanuts and most recently, cookie dough -- since 2006 that have eroded consumer confidence.
Under the new legislation, the industry would have to pay a $500 registration fee per facility to pay for more plant inspections. Farms, restaurants and retail food establishments that sell their products directly to consumers, not businesses, are exempt from this fee. There would be a $175,000 cap on such fees.
Organic farmers still say the definition of a facility is unclear in the legislation and they worry about additional costs that might be incurred on small businesses. Inspections will be more frequent, taking place every six to 12 months at high-risk facilities and between 18 months and three years for lower-risk locations.
As part of a broader food safety overhaul, the Obama administration recently announced the creation of a new post of deputy commissioner for foods at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The position would oversee all food safety activities within the agency.
Most organic farmers believe food safety reforms are necessary, but they worry small and medium organic farmers will be unfairly targeted.
"Based on the escalating cost that would be involved in conforming to this legislation -- administrative fees, record keeping and internal labor requirements -- we can force out of business some of the highest quality practitioners," said Mark Kastel, an analyst at the Cornucopia Institute in Wisconsin.
Kastel said organic farmers are tempering their enthusiasm for food safety reform with some skepticism.
"The same players who helped create the problems that exist today are enthusiastically embracing what they say is the answer," he said.
"It's unsettling when grocery associations and major processed food producers get together and agree with the government that they're going to do this without any regard to the high quality organic practitioners."
21 Comments so far
Show AllOur favorite local organic sprout producer - Mung Dynasty, produced organic sprouts from a space in the a former brewery building and distributed to a number of stores. He has gone out of business. The owner said that he would have had to hire a full-time microbiologist to meet new regulations. He cannot compete with bigger, non-local growers who can afford to comply with regulations.
I am all for food safety, but it appears that many regulations appear to be deliberately designed with corproate help to hurt the smallest businesses the most. Of course, the answer would be for government to provide the necessary lab and compliance services for businesses below a certain size. That would allow food safety while leveling the playing field.
But that would be Big Government.
The alternative is for the people to demand small-scale production over large-scale production. When the people demand small-scale production, then the small producers will survive. The small-scale production should be local. The exchange should be direct. Elites can screw things up in any number of ways. So it's best to keep elites, i.e. large-scale producers, out of the loop.
But let's look closer: The elites will argue that we really want large-scale to benefit from regulation/inspection efficiencies, among other things. But we don't need efficiency of scale. We do indeed want the redundancy of small-scale operations. We want the inspector to make a hundred stops instead of ten. Because a hundred producers are less able to collude, monopolize and abuse power. This is one of the basic advantages of localism. Spreading out the power, to minimize its abuse, and this is where the real efficiencies come. A dose of humility for all.
I couldn't have said it better. Well done.
Once again, this is up to us, and no one else. It's all in what we do and who we support.
As I pointed out in a previous thread on a similar subject and as the final paragraph in the first comment suggests, these fees and regulations are designed to kill the organic food sector of agriculture by driving small farmers out of business. Wall Street wants a few huge farmers and not a lot of small ones.
Also, Whole Foods is not the belwether of the organic food movement; Whole Foods is just another large corporation using slick marketing to make the public believe that its products are better than they really are.
Time to start gardening.
q
Here's my story: I never liked or believed in chem-corp-BIG-ag. My wife and I bought a small (tiny) farm when we were first married and just barely adults. It is a 40 acre 'farm' and I have privilige to farm my parents' 110 acres rent-free. About half of this total land is what-we-could-call tillable and the rest is really steep hills, wooded or swamp. I've always loved animals, especially horses and my wife grew up on a dairy farm and so we got cows of our own, little-by-little. The herd size is right around 18-20 milking cows. And we farmed quite a bit like the Amish, with horses, although I've always used tractors as well. My biggest tractor is 85 hp. It's a diesel and we have to pull it with another smaller tractor, an International 'M' to start. None of my machinery is worth a whole lot. Most of it is really really old and falling apart, I try to have junk, cast-off machinery around for parts. It is always a challenge to keep this stuff working. It has become more than just a challenge these last few years, it is virtually impossible now.
Just before we first bought this farm, the previous owner grew corn and sprayed it with Atrazine, a very popular herbicide that kills everything but corn. He did this on our steep hills and the result was a HUGE pile of eroded soil at the bottom of one of these hills, which grew NOTHING but a sickly looking moss for several years. I saw that and convinced myself to NEVER use the commonplace farm chemicals that I feel are nothing but poison. The neighbors laughed at us. This was 30 years ago.
I know animals, I know land and growing things, I know organic farming and I know natural farming and we are not being permitted to, let alone being REWARDED for doing it. Instead we are pawns, ordered around, sacrificed and abused by people who haven't any right to do so....they only can do so because they are part of a chain of command, that takes from the honest and the good and gives to the dishonest and the bad.
It's refreshing to hear from people who have actually worked as farmers comment about organic regulations. A number of people on Common Dreams who post have no idea how hard it can be to turn a profit from organic farming. Thank you for sharing your experience.
thanks farmgirl in the city...
..hey? what you doing in the city anyway? :)
(It is tough out here, things have gotten really really bad and the 'experts' just mumble and drone on and regularly cash their paychecks. It's enough to inspire revolt.)
It may also be that the same customers who would buy organic at the grocery are now buying organic at the farmers markets to support their local farmers, or even growing some of thier own vegetables.
I wonder if there is a way to bypass the whole government (actually now big-ag defined) definition of "organic" through some sort of natural foods collective.
For example, the dairy industry has their "Real" symbol that they control as a trademark that only companies that use milk can put on their products. This is just a private, non-governmental trademark symbol that their members can use.
If some organization made up their own clever name (can't use organic, natural, or real) and symbol and only allowed their members who meet certain organizational standards (like organic used to be), then consumers could ignore the "organic" label and just look for the new private symbol. That way, consumers would know that they were getting non-GMO healthy foods.
Undoubedly, the government would make it illegal.
What private label could possibly build the trust we need? We need independent third-party certification of practices.
i encourage everyone to visit the OCA and Cornucopia web sites and hear from activists who are fighting to uphold real organic standards. The new Deputy Secretary of Agriculture is preparing to appoint several representatives to the National Organic Standards Board and there are good candidates for these seats.
It is true that Big Ag industrial corporate monsters have worked for years to undermine organic standards, but activists have fought them off repeatedly. The best way to avoid GMOs in your food is to buy certified organic which forbids GMOs. The standards still require pasture feeding for organically certified dairy cows, we need to enforce the standards, and the new Deputy Secretary Kathleen A. Merrigan has a long history of working to uphold real organic standards (she helped write the original standards).
Before we all throw up our hands and say "give up on organic certification", please please please visit the Organic Consumers Association and Cornucopia Institute web sites. These hardworking activists are not blind to corporate industrial monsters, they are very aware of the real threats to our food systems and they are fighting hard to uphold organic standards that work for farmers and for eaters.
Growing your own, or buying direct from farmers you know, is the surest way to know what goes into the food you eat. But until civilization crashes, billions of people will buy food in stores. We need to fight for a certification system we can trust.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/
http://www.cornucopia.org/
This article is poorly written. Reuters usually does better than this.
If you don't already know the details of the backstory, you can get the impression reading the article that major safety issues with organically grown food and organic food producers have led to the proposed legislation, but this is not true.
There is better reporting at the advocacy sites of the Organic Consumers Association and the Cornucopia Institute.
Ultimately, most major outbreaks of food-borne illness trace back to confined feedlots and factory animal farms. But since the meat and dairy industries have major political clout that goes back many decades, this truth cannot even be mentioned in the corporate media.
If we really want effective legislation to improve food safety, we need to outlaw CAFOs.
Whole Foods is lucky that their sales went down only 5 percent in this economy. They carry quite a bit of gourmet cheese and deli items and a lot of nonfood items. The article says only that their sales went down 5 percent, but it does not say that it was 5 percent of their organic foods. The statistic is an overall for the whole store. Likely, people shopping there bought fewer expensive gourmet items and expensive take-out but bought the organic fresh items. They may have also bought more items to cook at home, which even there are less expensive than frozen food, etc.
I don't shop there, because their prices are too high, and I don't like the chain. They do behave more like big grocery chains than the alternative stores. I am lucky to have both Trader Joe and another small chain in Oregon called New Seasons. The stores carry lots of organics and herbal medicines, as well as higher quality nonorganic items and nonfood items, and the owner supports progressive legislation.
The bill is HR2749, also known as the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (FSEA).
I have had lots of email decrying the safe food legislation and claiming the FDA can put a lot of small organic farmers and organic food businesses out of business. One organization which makes some scary claims appears very legit, but the claims are fear-based projections: http://aahf.nonprofitsoapbox.com/
It appears that the bill definitely needs to be amended to exempt organic farms and lower the fines on small and very small processors, like solo organic cheese-makers and bread bakers. Please write to Rep. Waxman, one of the authors, to amend the bill. We need improved food safety but not the way the bill is currently written.
What then is HR875?
HR875 is the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, and is sitting in committee with no current action taken. As many analysts have pointed out throughout the controversy over this bill, HR875 actually has very little chance of moving forward.
HR2749 - the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 - has passed out of committee and may get voted on.
Concerns about both bills are similar - they address food safety issues by imposing registration, reporting and inspection on "food facilities", without language that defines "food facilities" in ways that protect small, local, independent, and holistic farming - without acknowledging that the mass outbreaks of food-borne illness they are reacting to have come from industrial-scale ag, not from small, local, independent and holistic farms.
Thanks webwalk
Well, the headline didn’t really match the article…
All those recalls and food scares… chicken, beef… don’t we need more food safety? someone asked me recently.
Well yes, but what we need is safety FROM corporate agriculture and modern technology, mixed with a little basic sanitation. What we’ll get is safety FOR corporations to practice agriculture any damn way they want while regulating small and organic ag out of business. Like the industry response to mad cow disease, they’ll do anything, suffer anything, sacrifice anything, to make food safer………as long they don’t actually have to suffer or sacrifice anything or make food any safer. They made a big show out of mad cow, waving their arms and shouting, shutting down innocent small-scale sheep and other farmers (read Mad Sheep) while continuing to do the one thing that is most likely to spread mad cow and similar disease—feed blood and body parts including brains to herbivorous animals.
S 425, HR 875 (Food Modernization Safety Act) splits off the drug and medical device part of the FDA, extends FDA’s authority to farm food production, and although defenders say it DOESN’T regulate seeds, farmers markets or intra-state food, for example, it does leave the door open for those and other organic-destructive regulations, and seems likely to lead to such intrusion into organics by corporate-dominated big-scale, chemical- and technology-oriented requirements. Defenders also say it doesn’t set up a mandatory animal registration system, which is correct, because that’s in HR 814; doesn’t require food-processing plants to pay for increased inspections, also true, because that’s in HR 759, and they say it doesn’t mandate any specific type of traceability for regulated foods, which it doesn’t, because the recordkeeping can be either paper or plastic—(computer). The requirement for computers is in HR 759. Such sleight of hand arguments make me even more suspicious than I would have been without mention of them.
HR 814, (TRACE, Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act); includes NAIS, National Animal Identification System, calls for FDA to establish production standards for fruits and vegetables and establish Good Agricultural practices for produce. It doesn’t specify what those practices will consist of, but the pesticide industry lawyer/lobbyist/PR dept.’s letter to Michelle Obama criticizing her for not using “crop protection” (aka pesticides) is an indication of what corporate agriculture wants, and when was the last time they didn’t get what they wanted?
HR 759 (FDA Globalization Act—overhauls structure of FDA), requires all those things HR 875 gets blamed for, and is more likely to pass while the kamikaze 875 goes down in distracting flames.
HR 2749, The Food Safety Enhancement Act, The Other White Meat… er I mean the other Waxman bill, would give the FDA the ability to recall food….except that pesky meat, which is mostly regulated by the USDA.
Meanwhile they ignore issues of dire importance even to people who have the sense not to swallow this crap—and by that I mean the food they produce as well as the lies. The bills do nothing to solve the real problems: the ecological, economic, social and climate-change damage caused by the enormous scale of agribusiness, the danger of such powerful and wealthy private and multinational corporations controlling life necessities, feedlots and monocultures that require massive and dangerous amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics while destroying soil and waterways and poisoning people and other beings, for example. Maybe we should do something.
It's a pleasure to read informed comments in this forum. Thank you.
What resources do you utilize to follow these various bills? I'm always looking for ways to stay better informed.
C'mon consumers, time to get down and get dirty. If you really want food security, grow yer own! Learn and practice the art and science of PERMACULTURE and you'll be involved in the most radical and subversive action for change.
Quitcher bitchin' and plant a kitchen garden. They can't stop us if a billion of us are growing our own food. No more lame excuses. Plant the seeds of the future. Better hurry, summer's half over.
Well?
What are you waiting for? Dig the earth, people! Plant seeds, sing songs.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to pick snap peas, strawberries and raspberries. Totally radical! And yummy!
PS, Look, all this food cost me nothing but a little time. My peas are from seeds I saved from last years crop, the strawberries are from stock I transplanted from my parents garden, my raspberries are from an old Norwegian farmer nearby. The excess we sell at Farmers market, and the rest we freeze, preserve or eat fresh. So it's more than just free, it's actually profitable!
Get on it!
Howl on Moondoggy!
And while you're enjoying that garden produce look into forest gardens, chickens, ducks, bees and goats and sheep. One wonderful thing about permaculture (using ecological principles to grow food and fiber) is everything helps everything else. Chicken or duck waste and bedding fertilize and mulch the garden while the birds eat weeds and bugs, for example. Less work, more food.
...
Naturally,
I listen to my local Pacifica radio station and intelligent talk shows on NPR (when they interview authors, especially, and 'Talk of the Nation' is particularly good on 'Science Fridays' (when they don't have idiots like Buzz Aldrin yapping about colonizing Mars, anyway). I read lots of books, and write an email blog so people send me links and news. Besides CommonDreams I subscribe to several email news services and blogs (Climate Progress, Grist, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity... and get Permaculture Activist and Orion magazines, a local bicycle activist newsletter and others.) Once you know the name and number of a bill look it up at:
www.govtrack.us/congress/billsearch.xpd
to read either a summary or the whole thing. And I talk to people. I surround myself with people who know something and have more than the normal amount of wisdom.
Thanks for those sources. I'll check into them.
I get OCA's Organic Bytes in my email regularly, and I know how to research a bill's progress once I know the exact number. But, a lot gets by me, and too many bills are considered and voted on before I know about them.
Too bad there's not an aggregater website dedicated to specific legislative topics. The closest thing I've found is themiddleclass.org, but they discuss only a limited number of bills on topics listed in their "Issue Areas" section.
I guess you could find an organization or website on every issue you're interested in (I'm a member of the Amer. Solar Energy Society, for example so I keep up with that area easily) but there are so many areas of the world and our lives under assault now, I can't imagine how it would be possible to keep up with everything. The more I give the more I get, I guess.
And I've had to give up on some things. The war was a big issue for a while--still is, but the main groups organizing against it are so splintered, contradictorily all-inclusive, marginalized and self-marginalizing I stopped paying attention. I think there are 3 intertwined things going on that everyone needs to be working on as hard as possible, that will determine the survival of civilization and humanity, and then whatever other issues one can handle. I call them the 3Cs: CLIMATE catastrophe and other ecological destruction, the CONSTITUTIONal crisis and the failing rule of law, and the excess power CORPORATIONS have over our lives and government. We need to work on all 3 together or we ain't gonna make it.
Without solving those, working on anything else, however crucial it seems, is just sticking a finger in a dike. And the dike is collapsing all around us.
We can do it; but we need to work on the causes; not the symptoms.