Battle over organic standards continues

Neither side is ready to give much ground.

Last week, Round 1 in the battle ended in a black eye for the United States Department of Agriculture. Under pressure from Congress and a cohesive organic food industry, USDA Secretary Ann M. Veneman rescinded four directives recently issued by her staff that would have allowed certain exceptions to the current organic food standards, established in 2002.

The idea was to clarify some gray areas in the regulations. Specifically, the directives would have added pesticides of questionable toxicity to the list of approved treatments for organic crops, allowed the treatment of organic dairy cows with antibiotics and permitted the use of fish meal, which may contain mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) or both, as food for organic dairy cows. Most troubling to the organic food industry, the USDA sidestepped federally mandated reviews.

The USDA staff is not dropping the matter there.

Barbara Robinson, deputy administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service and the author of the directives, manages the National Organic Program.

At the end of April, Robinson published the directives, intending, she says, to clarify the regulations. "We had been asked many questions about what was enforceable and thought the best way to answer those questions was by posting these clarifications on our website," she says.

She published the directives on the eve of the biannual meeting in Chicago of the National Organic Standards Board, a legislatively mandated body of private citizens who review what substances can, and cannot, be allowed in food labeled organic.

Presented with the directives as a fait accompli, the board saw red. "As I learned more about the directives, I became increasingly concerned that the USDA was radically rewriting the standards without outside comment," says Rebecca Goldburg, senior scientist at Environmental Defense and a member of the board.

"All of the directives relaxed the standards, allowing things that would never be considered organic," Goldburg says, noting that allowing milk from dairy cows that have been treated with antibiotics to be labeled organic was particularly problematic. "They were making the standards much less stringent, devaluing the standards to make them easier to meet."