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An organic industry watchdog group is calling on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to protect organic farmers and food from corrupt practices allowed by previous administrations.
In a letter to Kennedy, Organic Eye asked Kennedy to “actively intervene to save the true meaning of the organic label,” and offered to collaborate with him on that process.
As the organic industry has expanded over the last two decades, Organic Eye Executive Director Mark Kastel said major agro-industry players have come to dominate the industry, drowning out the voices of the family farmers who started it.
Agro-industry has successfully lobbied the USDA to allow practices — like hydroponic vegetable production and industrial meat, egg and milk production — to be certified as “organic” even though they don’t meet the original intent of the Organic Foods Production Act Congress passed in 1990, which established organics as an alternative to industrial farming, he said.
Industry lobbyists have also pressured USDA to enact rules and regulations that make it easy for fraudulent organic imports from countries including Turkey, India, China and others to flood U.S. markets at low prices, driving domestic organic family farmers out of business.
Former USDA Secretary Thomas Vilsack oversaw these and other developments that hurt family farmers while he served for 12 years under the Obama and Biden administrations, Kastel said.
Vilsack stacked the federal organic industry regulatory body — the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) — with more people tied to the Organic Trade Association (OTA), the industrial organic lobbying organization, according to Organic Eye.
“Instead of representing family farmers and independent voices as designated by Congress, the NOSB continues to be dominated by agribusiness interests with memberships and affiliations with the lobbyists at the OTA,” the organization said.
Organic Eye hopes Kennedy, who has long advocated for organic agriculture, and newly appointed USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins will work together to correct that.
“Mr. Trump was abundantly clear during his campaign that his administration would be dedicated to preserving and creating quality jobs for American workers, and we need to hold him to this promise,” said Kastel.
“Hard-working American farm families are unable to compete and are losing their livelihoods to fraudulent imports from countries with endemic levels of commercial fraud — counterfeit brand name products, food adulteration, pirating intellectual property rights and past organic fraud” — he added.
The organization is distributing a sign-on letter to members of the organic community that they hope will raise awareness about the many “major illegal activities” that took place under Vilsack’s watch, which they say “have caused thousands of organic family farmers to lose their livelihoods and eaters to become victims of consumer fraud.”
Co-opting the organics label
Organic family farmers worked for years to push Congress to pass the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990. At that time, Kastel said, agro-industry sought to undermine organic production, circulating ideas that it was unsafe, merely a marketing scheme or made false claims about genetically engineered foods.
At the same time they lobbied Congress to block organics and water down the regulatory process, industry giants like Monsanto funded smear campaigns against journalists, activists and scientists critical of conventional agriculture.
Those same companies began buying up small pioneering organic brands, Kastel said. “These companies decided that instead of attacking organics, they could take them over, stretch out their profit margins.”
Companies like General Mills now own Muir Glen tomato products and Cascadian Farms. Dean Foods, once the largest milk bottler in the country, bought Horizon Dairy.
Corporate agribusiness now controls a significant majority of the pioneering organic brands.
In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed former Iowa Governor Vilsack — named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization — as USDA secretary. Kastel said Vilsack appointed many members of the OTA to work in his office. “They weren’t out to destroy organics,” he said. “They were out to co-opt it.”
The type of farming they promoted, he said, is essentially conventional farming with minor changes. There is no mandate to change farming practices in ways that attend to human and environmental health — for example, crop rotation and other methods that develop healthy soils.
In another example, lobbyists successfully got rules changed about what constitutes a “cage-free organic” egg, rather than changing chicken-raising practices.
Under Vilsack, the organics program was also rife with illegal activities, like certifiers accepting payments from large agribusiness clients, Kastel said.
And under Vilsack’s watch, the NOSB came under the control of those large agribusiness corporations — seven of the current 15 NOSB members are intimately affiliated with the OTA, either as individual members, through their employers, and/or in some other professional capacity.
Organic Eye is urging Kennedy and Rollins to bring a better balance to that regulatory body so that farmers and public sector groups dedicated to organic agriculture have a stronger voice.
“If Mr. Kennedy does nothing more than say organics is good, he endorses this system. And I think he’s sophisticated enough to know that the real magic in organics is it being truly organic,” Kastel said.
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Changes needed at USDA
Kastel said as the federal government begins making cuts to USDA and its National Organic Program, it’s important to cut the programs that aren’t serving organic agriculture and redirect that money toward programs that will, while also setting policies that protect American farming.
Under Vilsack, he said, money often went to organizations that didn’t question the USDA’s status quo, or was spent in ways that couldn’t have the intended outcomes in the existing regulatory framework.
For example, the USDA spent hundreds of millions of dollars to recruit, train and mentor new farmers. But those farmers have to compete in an uneven playing field, Kastel said. In the U.S. farmers have to be certified and inspected annually, which is a cost the farmer pays. That regulation is important for ensuring that foods are organic.
But U.S. farmers have complained that their annual inspection and certification fees are rising quickly to help pay for additional audit trail surveillance when other methods of ensuring organic production would be more effective. At the same time, the USDA is allowing foreign agribusinesses to supervise their own uncertified farmer-suppliers, according to Organic Eye.
The NOSB typically meets twice a year in different locations around the U.S. The board onsiders public comments and votes on recommendations to the USDA secretary. Earlier this month, the meeting was rescheduled to take place virtually, but soon after, it was postponed with no further information about when it would take place.
The organic industry needs effective oversight, Kastel said, and Organic Eye is hoping new leadership will better enforce regulations, not eliminate them.
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