Organics

Salon.com - Crowding the market

When the US government said it was relaxing organic standards, small farmers and green consumers fought back. Their suspicion, Dan Glaister reports, is that big corporations want to hijack a growing sector

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In April, the US agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman, announced a relaxation of the rules governing organic produce. Without public consultation the US department of agriculture (USDA) issued four directives which would have allowed organic farmers to use chemicals of unknown provenance on crops, to treat organic dairy cows with anti- biotics, and to feed organic cattle with non-organic fish meal.


The last directive was perhaps the most alarming and also the most comical. Declaring that it would take too long to come up with definitive guidelines as to what precisely constituted an organic fish, USDA declared that for the time being, any fish could be considered organic.


The outcry was immediate and took government officials by surprise. Where was the public consultation mandated by law, asked critics? Why was a government famously friendly to big business relaxing the regulations governing organic produce? And why introduce uncertainty into a market that was flourishing quite nicely without interference?

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Now America's organic farmers are watching the Bush administration to see if it makes good its pledge to consider their views in drawing up new definitions of just what can and cannot be called organic. Many fear the worst, and suspect that the attempt to lower the threshold for organic goods is merely a prelude to a general relaxation of standards, paving the way for agribusiness to market itself as organic and sell its products in the farmers' markets that provide the lifeblood for so many small growers.

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