JULY 9, 2003
MOVEABLE FEAST
By Thane Peterson
The Lies Spoiling Organic Food | It's good to clearly label food that spurns pesticides and modified genes. Too bad politicians are already working to subvert the system
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After a dozen years of hearings and deliberation, the U.S. Agriculture Dept. issued official standards for organic foods last October. And -- surprise, surprise -- a government agency actually did a pretty good job. For the first time, American consumers could buy food labeled "organic" and know that it was actually produced using organic growing techniques -- i.e, without growth hormones, antibiotics, chemical herbicides and pesticides, and genetically altered materials. The new regs mark a major improvement over the days when the "organic" label could be slapped on all sorts of foods that weren't much different from conventional supermarket fare.
Unfortunately, politicians can never resist fiddling with a good idea. So, in the months since the standards were passed, according to an editorial in the August issue of Consumer Reports, a number of attempts have been made to jigger the rules so that foods can carry this designation that otherwise wouldn't qualify. "Everyone wants to label their product organic because it will sell for a higher price," says Jean Halloran, director of the Consumer Policy Institute of Consumer's Union, the nonprofit organization that publishes the magazine.
HEDGED BETS. Why should you care? The answer is obvious if, like me, you're leery of ingesting tasteless, rock-hard supermarket fruit and chickens raised in a space the size of a Palm Pilot. But even if you regard organic food as a whacko fringe trend, the issue is still important.
Organic food, though it accounts for less than 1% of U.S. production, is the only segment of American and Canadian agriculture that doesn't seem bent on committing hari kari in international markets. With consumers overseas increasingly resistant to food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), maintaining an untainted U.S. organic-food industry is like a prudent investment manager keeping a small fraction of her portfolio in gold. It's a hedge in case the worst-case scenario materializes and GMO foods turn out to have unexpected problems.
With food scares like the recent mad cow outbreak in Canada making many consumers nervous, organic food is already selling briskly. It usually costs 30% to 50% more than conventional food, according to Luanne Lohr, an agricultural economist at the University of Georgia, but U.S. sales are nonetheless soaring by 20% annually. Many consumers believe that organic meat and poultry is probably safer than conventional fare because the animals are raised without hormones, antibiotics, and feed containing animal byproducts.
FEAR OF MUCKING. Organic food is also the one segment of the U.S. market that contains virtually no GMOs. That's not true even of kosher food, which is also enjoying robust sales as a presumably safer alternative.
Now, whatever you think of GMOs, it's quite clear that consumers in most of the world don't want them in their food. They fear that mucking around with the food chain may have unpredictable environmental and health consequences and are unwilling to turn over their food production to big U.S. companies such as Monsanto (MON ) and DuPont (DD ), which are developing bioengineered seed and agricultural chemicals.
Indeed, organic-food production is climbing around the world -- Germany even has a national plan to raise organics to 10% of its total food output by 2010. It's also why countries in Europe and Asia have been passing laws requiring that genetically altered foods be labeled. If that happens, sales of many foods from the U.S. and Canada seem likely to plunge.
The Bush Administration is casting this as a trade issue, arguing that foreigners want to keep out U.S.-grown gene-altered food as a form of protectionism. That's wrong-headed thinking. You can't force foreign consumers to eat products they -- rightly or wrongly -- don't believe are safe. And far from being protectionist, labeling requirements are a purely democratic measure and allow consumers to make their own choices.
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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