Tuesday, April 21, 1998

Deciding what organic really means

By Ellen Goodman

BOSTON - This is not your everyday political event. How often does a grass-roots movement ask the government to regulate its own enterprise? When was the last time small operators rose up to bitterly complain that government rules and regulations weren't strict enough?

But this is the upside-down nature of a food fight that has erupted between the United States Department of Agriculture and the organic farming community.

Ever since last December when the USDA released the first-ever proposals for minimum standards for organic foods, a full-scale debate has been raging about the meaning of the "O" word. Now, an astonishing 101,000 farmers and chefs, and consumers and environmentalists have developed an appetite for protest. In the face of an April 30 deadline for comments, they have registered deep disapproval of the agency's taste.

This story of "O" began in the best biblical tradition with an apple. In the Alar scare of 1989-90, people became alarmed about chemicals. Suddenly, a bumper crop of apples appeared on the market bearing the label "organic."

Organic farming, which once exuded the aura of a hippie enterprise with lethargic and overpriced vegetables, was just becoming a full-fledged alternative. The apples of dubious "organic" origin convinced many in the disparate community that they needed a national standard to prevent fraud and maintain consumer confidence.

These farmers were always wary of involving the USDA, an agency which, to put it gently, has been a bastion of conventional farming and a buddy of agribusiness. But with the help of Vermont's Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Organic Foods Production Act was passed in 1990 to determine minimum standards. Farmers, consumers, scientists and environmentalists spent four years working out an agreement on the definition of organic.

Then the USDA stepped in, to fulfill their worst fears. In the tradition of the "fox guarding the henhouse," the agency proposed to lower these standards.

The USDA rules would, for example, allow lettuce fertilized with sewage sludge, genetically engineered pigs and irradiated radicchio to carry the label "organic." They would allow a chicken that had never seen the light of day, let alone a free range, to carry an "organic" tag.

These giant loopholes in the "O" are big enough to drive a truck through. "We'd have Tyson's Organic Chickens before you could blink an eye," says Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It would doom the word organic."

If the Department of Agriculture is surprised by the huge outrage, that in itself is not surprising. The department's bias toward conventional farming is long and deep. Organic farming is now a $4 billion business growing by 20 percent a year. But its success is taken as a rebuke to the factory-farming, supermarket-to-the-world agribusiness that is now the rule.

Indeed it is widely believed that the folks marketing sludge, promoting genetic engineering or irradiation got the USDA's ear because they want to piggyback onto the good name of "organic" to mute controversies here and abroad.

We can debate the safety of genetic engineering till the cloned cows come home, but it fits no image of organic farming. This food fight is not just about safety of the product. It's about the process of farming.

As Kathleen Merrigan of the National Organic Standards Board puts it, "We want a label that connects people to how their food is produced. We want to give people a way to be sure their food was produced by people who are walking lightly on the earth."

Americans have a nostalgic and primal relationship to the farm. But at this moment, agriculture, like other parts of the economy, is going in two directions.

The larger trend is to consolidate farmland as if it were a megabank. It's to industrialize farming, and mass produce identical products on a land factory. The sturdy but smaller trend is toward diversity, toward sustaining the land itself.

Today organic farms are not just food boutiques, trendy little supply centers for people who are willing to pay more for mesclun greens. They are the labs, the models, the alternatives.

The USDA has done little to promote organic farms. But if these proposals are put into law, organic will have lost any meaning. The "O" in the O-word will stand for Zero.

The Boston Globe Newspaper Company