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The Colossal Hoax Of Organic Agriculture

w_r_ranch

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I've made mention of what a joke the USDA's organic rules are in the past... here is another article from Forbes.

Henry I. Miller and Drew L. Kershen

Organic agriculture is an unscientific, heavily subsidized marketing gimmick that misleads and rips off consumers. The federal government should stop promoting and subsidizing it.

Consumers of organic foods are getting both more and less than they bargained for. On both counts, it’s not good.

Many people who pay the huge premium—often more than a hundred percent–for organic foods do so because they’re afraid of pesticides. If that’s their rationale, they misunderstand the nuances of organic agriculture. Although it’s true that synthetic chemical pesticides are generally prohibited, there is a lengthy list of exceptions listed in the Organic Foods Production Act, while most “natural” ones are permitted. However, “organic” pesticides can be toxic. As evolutionary biologist Christie Wilcox explained in a 2012 Scientific American article (“Are lower pesticide residues a good reason to buy organic? Probably not.”): “Organic pesticides pose the same health risks as non-organic ones.”

Another poorly recognized aspect of this issue is that the vast majority of pesticidal substances that we consume are in our diets “naturally and are present in organic foods as well as non-organic ones. In a classic study, UC Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues found that “99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.” Moreover, “natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests.” Thus, consumers who buy organic to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on just one-hundredth of one percent of the pesticides they consume.

Some consumers think that the USDA National Organic Program (NOP) requires certified organic products to be free of ingredients from “GMOs,” organisms crafted with molecular techniques of genetic engineering. Wrong again. USDA does not require organic products to be GMO-free. (In any case, the methods used to create so-called GMOs are an extension, or refinement, of older techniques for genetic modification that have been used for a century or more.) As USDA officials have said repeatedly:

"Organic certification is process-based. That is, certifying agents attest to the ability of organic operations to follow a set of production standards and practices which meet the requirements of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 and the [National Organic Program] regulations . . . If all aspects of the organic production or handling process were followed correctly, then the presence of detectable residue from a genetically modified organism alone does not constitute a violation of this regulation." [emphasis added]​

Putting it another way, so long as an organic farmer abides by his organic system (production) plan–a plan that an organic certifying agent must approve before granting the farmer organic status–the unintentional presence of GMOs (or, for that matter, prohibited synthetic pesticides) in any amount does not affect the organic status of the farmer’s products or farm.

Under only two circumstances does USDA sanction the testing of organic products for prohibited residues (such as pesticides, synthetic fertilizers or antibiotics) or excluded substances (e.g., genetically engineered organisms). First, USDA’s National Organic Production Standards support the testing of products if an organic-certifying agent believes that the farmer is intentionally using prohibited substances or practices. And second, USDA requires that certifying agents test five percent of their certified operations each year. The certifying agents themselves determine which operations will be subjected to testing.

he organic community, including the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM), supports the USDA’s lenient testing protocols and opposes more frequent mandatory testing of organic products for prohibited and excluded substances.
The organic community and USDA offer two explanations for such minimal testing. First, they emphasize that organic farming is process-based, not product-based, meaning that what counts for organic certification are the approved organic system (production) plan and the farmer’s intention to comply with that plan as reflected through record-keeping obligations.

Second, widespread testing would impose substantial costs on organic farmers, thereby increasing production costs beyond the already greater expenses that organic farmers incur. Organic farmers offset these higher productions costs by earning large premiums for organic products, but there is always a price point beyond which consumers will shift to cheaper non-organic.

Few organic consumers are aware that organic agriculture is a “trust-based” or “faith-based” system. With every purchase, they are at risk of the moral hazard that an organic farmer will represent cheaper-to-produce non-organic products as the premium-priced organic product. For the vast majority of products, no tests can distinguish organic from non-organic—for example, whether milk labeled “organic” came from a cow within the organic production system or from a cow across the fence from a conventional dairy farm. The higher the organic premium, the stronger the economic incentive to cheat.

Think such nefarious behavior is purely theoretical? Think again. USDA reported in 2012 that 43 percent of the 571 samples of “organic” produce tested violated the government’s organic regulations and that “the findings suggest that some of the samples in violation were mislabeled conventional products, while others were organic products that hadn’t been adequately protected from prohibited pesticides.”

How do organic farmers get away with such chicanery? A 2014 investigation by the Wall Street Journal of USDA inspection records from 2005 on found that 38 of the 81 certifying agents–entities accredited by USDA to inspect and certify organic farms and suppliers—“failed on at least one occasion to uphold basic Agriculture Department standards.” More specifically, “40% of these 81 certifiers have been flagged by the USDA for conducting incomplete inspections; 16% of certifiers failed to cite organic farms’ potential use of banned pesticides and antibiotics; and 5% failed to prevent potential commingling of organic and non-organic products.”

Speaking of trust and faith—or lack thereof–in organic foods, there was the example of holier-than-thou Whole Foods importing large amounts of its supposedly “organic” produce from China, of all places. Those imports even included Whole Foods’ house brand, “California Blend.” (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Organic agriculture is an unscientific, heavily subsidized marketing gimmick that misleads and rips off consumers, both because of the nature of the regulations and cheating. The old saying that you get what you pay for doesn’t apply when you buy overpriced organic products.

Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA. Drew L. Kershen is the Earl Sneed Centennial Professor of Law (Emeritus), University of Oklahoma College of Law.
 

wolffman

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I was once interested in producing "organic" garlic for commercial sale. Then I read all the rules. It was a joke. You're still allowed a certain percentage of chemical fertilizer. There's no real way to track how much chemical fertilizers these guys are actually laying down on their crops. And that issue was just the tip of the iceberg. I laugh at the folks in the "organic circles".
 

Mike

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To me organic is nothing more than a marketing term. I'm in the IT field and another term comes to mind that's pretty similar "the cloud" - it's all marketing games. In this case I didn't realize the government was subsidizing "organic" farms.
 
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ErnieCopp

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The innocent victims are people of limited means that have been scared into paying the extra money for anything labeled "ORGANIC"..
We have a friend like that, and she wastes a large part of her food budget on pure nonsense.

Ernie
 
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Mr_Yan

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I'll start this off with I just skimmed w_r_ranch's embedded article. I don't buy organic foods and don't really buy into the whole idea but I do use several of the organic gardening methods.

Over the last year I have done a lot of main stream reading about our food system:
Mark Kurlansky's Cod
Joel Salatin's Folks, This Ain't Normal
Paul Greengerg's Four Fish
Will Allen's The Good Food Revolution
Nina Fedoroff's Mendel in the Kitchen
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma
Dan Barber's The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
Eric Toensmeier's Paradise Lot

And general talking with my step dad - a retired PhD Ag Chemist who was pretty high up at Monsanto.

Generally what I have learned is there's no measured and studied difference between typical produce and typical big scale organic produce. There are several measurements where small scale true organic ("beyond organic" as Salatin of Polyface Farm calls it) methods do yield more nutritious crops. But these are single measurements from a specific farm.

There's also no requirement that crops grown with shady industrial organic methods are labeled as organic. If the market price falls on an item it can be repackaged in conventional packaging. The organic industry has quietly fought the requirement that it be labled organic while pushing for "GMO" labels.

That's a crock in itself, all food (except some wild fish and some wild mushrooms) have been heavily genetically modified. Which is safer using a known virus to splice in some genes in a plant with a well know genome and testing with mass spectroscopy or blasting a bunch of seeds and flowers with radiation or chemical mutagens and planting large fields with them to see what you get.

I think it was Fedoroff who was talking about how industrial organic can't match the yields and efficency of modern agriculture. Because of this to replace all agriculture with industrial organic would require bringing more land into cultivation. Her estimate required increasing cultivated land by an area roughly the size of the US. So which rain forests, mega-cities, and third world countries should we bulldoze first? Chicago is high on my list for bulldozing, or at least giving to Wisconsin.

The biggest thing I see though are the people who yell the loudest about it are generally the furthest away. This was brought up in an article I read early this week. Why is it an all or nothing type thing. Use what works in each setting this is not a one size fits all.

On the other hand I have been reading a lot of doom and gloom type things and think a lot more people should start growing some veg gardens and keeping a stocked pantry. Those "survival seed banks" you can buy packaged in mylar bags in a sealed pipe-bomb looking container then bury in the back yard are a joke. You may have enough seeds to plant an acre garden but do you really know how?
 
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