Save Organic Standards Campaign
® Irradiating foods with nuclear waste
® Using toxic sewage and industrial sludge to fertilize farmland
® Allowing genetically manipulated organisms in food crops and food
® Permitting factory farms and caged poultry operations
® Allowing the use of livestock antibiotics and synthetic medicines
® Accepting undisclosed toxic synthetic ³inert² pesticide ingredients
® Using ³incidental² food additives, enzymes and food colorings
® Requiring only 80% organic livestock feed (instead of 100%)
® Allowing synthetic food processing aids, adulterants and additives
Absolutely none of these, or some 60 other USDA definitions, have ever been considered Organic or allowed as such in the marketplace by the existing national and international organic certifiers!In fact, these definitions clearly violate the provisions and definitions set forth by the original Congressional Law, the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 that instructed USDA to formulate the Organic Program in the first place!!
If these spurious regulations are allowed to go through, farmers and manufacturers will be prohibited from identifying products in the store based on production practices. Consumers will lose their freedom of choice and their ability to ³vote² for an environmentally positive agriculture with their food choice dollar purchases. Also, Parents will lose their choice and control over the content of what they can feed their children. Personal health advocates will suffer the loss of their major dietary alternative. Students will relinquish their healthy food choices for now and the rest of their lives. Environmentalists will hand over ecologically beneficent farming to industrialized chemical and transgenic agribusiness, while the true organic farmers get the ground pulled out from underneath them. However, Agribusiness will love it!!
What to do? Right away -- write, email and fax letters to Secretary Glickman at USDA, your Congressperson, your Senators, and President Clinton -- to investigate USDA¹s unwarranted and illegal actions and to scrap their bogus National Organic Program entirely -- and save our organic standards!!
Dear Representative, Senator,
I am extremely concerned about USDA¹s proposed National Organic Program (NOP) now being submitted for public comment. The NOP Rules completely disregard the long established meaning and practices of organic agriculture and instead allow a huge number of injurious farming methods, synthetic substances, chemical adulterants and toxic constituents to qualify for a federal organic label. These include irradiating foods with nuclear waste, using toxic sewage and industrial sludge as fertilizer, allowing genetically manipulated organisms in crops and food, permitting factory farming operations and allowing synthetic food processing aids, adulterants and additives.
In fact, none of these, or some 60 plus other allowances outlined in the NOP Rules have EVER been considered Organic or allowed as such in the marketplace by the existing state, national and international organic certification organizations! This program will completely gut the meaning of Organic and will allow spurious products in the marketplace. In addition, USDA¹s proposed excessive fee structures will automatically disenfranchise a large number of existing organically certified farmers and will put many of the smaller organic certification organizations out of business.
Further, under the bogus USDA Organic label, farmers and manufacturers will be prohibited from identifying products in the store based on production practices. Consumers, parents, personal health advocates, environmental advocates and many others will very definitely lose their freedom of choice -- and they are not going to be happy about it! This issue is directly analogous to the attempts by special interests to allow foreign-made ingredients to still qualify for the ³Made In USA² label. As you will recall, this was resoundingly shot down in Congress by consumers and others who demanded adherence to true and valid label.
Finally, USDA¹s actions regarding the formulation and execution of the NOP should be Investigated immediately. They have definitely pulled a bureaucratic end run around the letter and intent original Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFPA) and are clearly in violation of a great number of its precepts. As such, USDA is openly liable for legal action. USDA should be required to start over completely and come up with a valid National Organic Program based on the OFPA mandates, without giveaways to the special interests!!I look forward to your response at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
Name
Address
Save Organic Standards Campaign
Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, 200-A Whitten Bldg. 1400 Independance Ave, SW. Washington, DC 20250 agsec@usda.gov
President William Clinton, The White House, 16 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, DC 20xxx president@whitehouse.gov
THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING
Save Organic Standards Campaign
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