In March 2005, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided in
Harvey v. Veneman that if a product is marketed as organic, all
ingredients and processing materials must be 100 percent
organic.
This month, however, Congress is considering an amendment to an
agriculture funding bill that has the power to revert organic
marketing rules to pre-Harvey standards.
The amendment is in reaction to court decisions supporting
Arthur Harvey’s lawsuit in 2002 against the government for
allowing products containing synthetic ingredients to be sold as
organic. Harvey is an organic-blueberry farmer from Maine.
According to an industry estimate by the Organic Trade
Association, the lawsuit could cost manufacturers $758 million in
revenues.
“Certified organic has its standards for a specific reason
because it is not detrimental to the environment. It doesn’t
cause air and water pollution … There is absolutely no use of
pesticides, soil run off, (and) all of these are the type of things
(that) were required by the former standards,” said Megan
Carney, UC Food Systems Campaign chairwoman at UCLA.
As organic food increases in popularity, growing from a $1
billion industry in 1990 to an estimated $14.5 billion this year,
it constitutes two percent of national food and beverage sales,
said Holly Givens, representative for the Organic Trade
Association.
An internal debate has developed between the farming and
manufacturing communities about what exactly the word
“organic” should mean.
“There was (already) all this talk … (in) the whole
organic community, especially by, of course, the people who have
been working on certification for the last 20 years,” said
Thomas Wittman, an organic farmer from Davenport.
“What Harvey did was it brought everything to a head and
made it sound so simple for people to be certified organic,”
Wittman said.
In part, this is a battle over a label, Carney said.
The big producers, who often use synthetic materials in
processing, want to call their processed foods organic because that
designation commands premium prices, she said.
In 2002 the Department of Agriculture began its program of
national organic certification, and there has been a steady
lobbying effort to alter standards in a way that makes it easier
for the giant food companies, which often use synthetic substances
during production of goods, to enter the organic market.
Locally, the UC Sustainable Agriculture Program works with local
growers that are both certified organic and uncertified.
There is a debate between farmers that don’t prescribe to
organic standards yet produce local goods and the farmers that are
both local and organic, Carney said.
“The local farmers have been wanting to be included in
(the organic market) for quite some time but then obviously that
kind of lowers the overall product of what is organic,”
Carney said.
Congress is now trying to settle the debate as well as allow for
growth of the industry, according to the Organic Trade
Association.
An amendment to the Agriculture Spending Bill would affect two
aspects of organic standards. It would overturn the Harvey
decision, reinstating the old legal standard that prohibits
synthetic substances in organic foods, but it would allow the
agriculture secretary to approve synthetic substances if no organic
substitute was commercially available.
In this lawsuit Harvey argued that the basic principle of the
law is that anything labeled organic has to be 95 percent organic
and 100 percent natural.
The principle is simple for Harvey and farmers like him to
follow but it is more complicated when food needs to be
processed.
For example, the thickening process in the production of jam
usually requires pectin.
Pectin comes from fruit peels, but because of how it is
prepared, it is technically a synthetic product. The proposed
amendment would allow the jam to be classified as organic.
“Harvey’s demand were very idealistic and very
righteous, and in the true spirit of organics. Unfortunately, those
high thresholds aren’t possible in today’s world (and)
there must be some kind of compromise,” Wittman said.