Challenge to Organic Farming Standards

New USDA guidelines issued in April allowing limited use of pesticides and antibiotics in organic farming provoked a quick response from organic farming advocates. The guidance statements and enforcement directives would have allowed:

1) Organic producers to use pesticides that may contain inert chemical ingredients even if a reasonable effort fails to identify the inert ingredients. Pesticide makers are usually not required to list all inactive ingredients in their products, but material approved for organic farming must have inert ingredients identified and approved as well as the major component of the product.

2) Milk producing cows to be treated with drugs, like antibiotics and growth hormones, 12 months before milk from the cow is sold as organic.

3) Ground fish to be used as a protein supplement in livestock feed. The issue here would have been that fish from aquaculture farms or even marine sources could contain synthetic preservatives and contaminants like PCBs and mercury.

Barbara Robinson, a deputy administrator in charge of the USDA’s National Organic Program, said the National Organic Standards Board, which consults with the USDA on organic farming standards, was not consulted beforehand because USDA officials thought they were defining the limits of existing regulations, not establishing new ones.

On May 27, Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman, announced that the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, the agency in charge of the National Organic Program, would rescind these changes and work more closely with the National Organic Standards Board. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the prime congressional sponsor of the National Organic Program since the 1990s, called the new regulations "unilateral fiats" and worked with other congressmen to urge the Secretary to rescind these controversial regulations.

In April, 2003, another challenge to the National Organic Program, the "Fiedale Loophole", was issued. In February, Representative Nathan Deal, Georgia Republican, inserted a measure into a federal spending bill that would have allowed a Georgia poultry producer, Fiedale Farms, to use a less expensive non-organic livestock feed instead of more expensive organic feed to produce organically grown chickens. This would have undermined National Organic Standards and Patrick Leahy again successfully repealed this provision.

(NY Times - May 26-27, 2004)