Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [139]
Organic Foods. Because practices related to organic farming were inconsistent, organic farmers attempted to set up a voluntary certification program but could not reach consensus on how to do that. They asked Congress to establish mandatory rules for designating food as organic, and legislators did so in 1990 when they passed the Organic Food Production Act and established a National Organic Standards Board to advise the USDA about implementation. The board, realizing that Congress had passed the legislation before bioengineered foods were on the market, recommended “as a policy matter” that genetically modified foods be excluded from those considered organically grown.29
In proposing standards, the USDA was especially sensitive to objections that organic implied criticism of other agricultural methods. In what appeared to be a compromise forced by mainstream agricultural producers, the agency asked for public comment on whether organic could be applied to foods that had been genetically modified, irradiated, or fertilized with reprocessed sewage (“sludge”). Buried in a 120-page and especially impenetrable Federal Register notice were a few short paragraphs unlikely to shed light on the department’s position on these issues. For example:
We do not consider non-synthetic substances that have been treated with a synthetic substance, but which have not been chemically altered by a manufacturing process, to be synthetic under the definition given in the Act. . . . We have included toxins derived from genetically engineered bacteria on the proposed National List primarily so that we can receive comment on the proper classification of these substances and on whether they should be allowed, prohibited, or approved on a case-by-case basis.
Translation: the USDA considers genetic engineering and irradiation to be processes that do not alter the fundamental nature of food and, therefore, proposes to include transgenic foods on the Federal List of foods certified as organically grown.
When the USDA invited comments on this idea, the agency got them. By February 1998, just two months after publication of the notice, 4,000 people had filed comments, many of them along the lines of “USDA should not permit corporate agribusiness lobbyists and bureaucrats in Washington to force-feed the rules to organic farmers and their customers.” In response to the deluge, the USDA postponed the comment deadline and scheduled public hearings. By March, an extraordinary grassroots campaign based on the Internet, notices on milk cartons, and other low-cost efforts had elicited 15,000 comments, nearly all of them negative. I can attest to the breadth and persistence of this effort; for weeks, I received daily electronic mail instructions about how to file comments on this issue. By the deadline, the USDA organic standards docket contained an astonishing 275,603 letters, with genetic engineering eliciting the most criticism.30
Eventually, the USDA responded to public demand and dropped the controversial proposals; it would not permit genetically modified, irradiated, sewage-fertilized foods, or animals fed antibiotics to be labeled as organic. The organic foods industry and its constituents hailed the decision as a decisive victory: “Organic food stores are no longer just little co-ops with tofu and bean sprouts. . . . They alerted their customers, and the customers rejected the proposed rules.”31 Biotechnology industry representatives criticized the decision as “political, not based on any realistic assessment of risks, benefits, or science,” and USDA officials reassured them that