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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] What Is Organic? Powerful Players Want a Say
  • Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 09:07:00 -0700


www.nytimes.com
November 1, 2005

What Is Organic? Powerful Players Want a Say
By MELANIE WARNER

Customers at McDonald's restaurants in New England are about to get
something a little different
when they order coffee. Through a deal with Green Mountain Coffee
Roasters and Newman's Own,
McDonald's will soon be serving a coffee that comes from organic beans
and is certified Fair
Trade because it meets higher standards in the treatment of coffee
workers.

The move, while still a test in a limited region, reflects a much
broader trend: The growing
interest among large food companies in offering organic foods along
with their standard products.
General Mills markets the Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen brands; Kraft
owns Back to Nature and
Boca Foods, which makes soy burgers. Within the last few years, Dean
Foods, the dairy giant,
has acquired Horizon Organic and White Wave, maker of Silk organic
soymilk. Groupe Danone, the
French dairy company, owns Stonyfield Farm.

Wal-Mart wants in, too. "We are particularly excited about organic
food, the fastest-growing
category in all of food," Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's chief executive, said
at a recent shareholder
meeting. "It's a great example of how Wal-Mart can appeal to a wider
range of customers."

But as organic food enters the mainstream, evolving from an idealistic
subculture rooted in
images of granola and Birkenstocks, a bitter debate has ensued over
what exactly the word
"organic" should mean. And now Congress is jumping into the
controversy.

With sales of roughly $12 billion, organic food remains a niche market
within the $500 billion
food industry. But the sector's growing appeal to consumers has fueled
a 20 percent annual
growth rate in recent years, making it highly attractive to food giants
looking for gains in a
slow-moving business.

At General Mills, the Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen brands increased
sales by 21 percent in the
last year, according to the research firm Information Resources Inc.,
while the company's
overall business was up just 1.6 percent.

Consumer groups and some organic pioneers say they are concerned that
the movement - a response
to the practices of corporate food production that promotes a natural
chemical-free approach to
farming - will become watered down unless firm standards are
maintained.

The debate has been under way for several years. But last week, Senate
and House Republicans on
the Agriculture appropriations subcommittee inserted a last-minute
provision into the
department's fiscal 2006 budget specifying that certain artificial
ingredients could be used in
organic food.

The Organic Trade Association, an industry lobbying group that proposed
the amendment and spent
several months pushing for its adoption, says that the measure will
encourage the continued
growth of organic food.

Some advocacy groups, however, say the amendment will weaken federal
organic food standards,
first established under a 1990 law. Ronnie Cummins, national director
of the Organic Consumers
Association, calls the initiative a "sneak attack engineered by the
likes of Kraft, Dean Foods
and Smucker's."

One of the lobbyists for Altria, Kraft's majority owner, Abigail Blunt
- the wife of
Representative Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, who recently became
interim House majority
leader after Tom DeLay of Texas resigned from the post - has been
working on the issue, the
company says.

Dean Foods' subsidiary Horizon Organic and the J. M. Smucker Company,
the owner of Knudsen and
Santa Cruz Organic juices, said they supported the work by the Organic
Trade Association, which
represents both large and small companies in the business, but did no
lobbying on their own.

The amendment injects Congress directly into the debate over whether
certain artificial
ingredients and industrial chemicals should be allowed in products
labeled organic. In a
lawsuit ruled upon in January, Arthur Harvey, an organic blueberry
farmer, argued that no
synthetics at all should be in food bearing the "U.S.D.A. Organic"
seal. A federal judge agreed,
sending shivers down the spine of many organic food manufacturers.

Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade
Association, said that the
amendment was intended to protect the industry from the Harvey ruling
and will not change the
status quo. If applied, the judge's ruling would have forced many
manufacturers to stop using
the U.S.D.A. Organic seal and instead relabel products to state, for
instance, "cookies made
with organic flour" or "frozen lasagna made with organic tomatoes."

Many in the organic industry say they are willing to allow some use of
synthetics in organic
food. Since 2002, the National Organic Standards Board, a 15-member
panel of advisers appointed
by the Agriculture Department, has served as the gatekeeper for such
substances. In that time,
38 have been approved, many of them relatively harmless ingredients
like baking powder, pectin,
ascorbic acid and carbon dioxide.

But Joseph Mendelson, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, a
liberal advocacy group,
says that the proposed legislation will open the door to a range of
other chemicals and
artificial materials, including a large category of so-called food
contact substances -
things like boiler additives, disinfectants and lubricants with
unpronounceable names.

Most of these substances would not end up in finished products in
detectable amounts. But many
in the organic community say that these tools of mainstream food
processing do not belong in
organic production.

"We don't want organic food manufacturers having carte blanche use of
the same kind of
synthetics that conventional food processors use, especially when it
involves things that do
not appear on the ingredient panels," said James A. Riddle, chairman of
the National Organic
Standards Board. "I think people choose to buy organic food because
they don't use all those
things."

Ms. DiMatteo contends that the Organic Trade Association is not trying
to loosen organic
standards or take authority away from the standards board.

At the same time, Charles Sweat, chief operating officer at Earthbound
Farm, the country's
argest grower of organic produce, said he was concerned with the
section of the spending bill
that gives the Agriculture Department authority to grant temporary
exemptions to allow
conventionally grown ingredients like corn, soybean oil or tomatoes in
organic food when
organic versions are not "commercially available."

"We see this as opening up a Pandora's box," Mr. Sweat said. "Any
company that can't compete
because something is too expensive could go to the secretary and claim
they need an exemption."

George Simeon, chief executive of Organic Valley, a cooperative of
mostly small organic dairy
farmers, wrestled with the high cost of organic production a little
over a year ago when
Wal-Mart asked for a 20 percent price cut. For three years, Organic
Valley had been Wal-Mart's primary supplier of organic milk.

"Wal-Mart allows you to really build market share," Mr. Simeon said.
"But we're about our values
and being able to sustain our farmers. If a customer wants to stretch
us to the point where
we're not able to deliver our mission, then we have to find different
markets."

Mr. Simeon told Wal-Mart to get a new supplier.

Dean Foods' Horizon Organic was better equipped to satisfy Wal-Mart's
demands. Horizon gets
about 20 percent of its production from a 4,000-cow organic dairy in
Paul, Idaho, which is
small in comparison with many conventional dairy farms but huge by
organic standards.

Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst at Cornucopia, a group
representing small dairy farmers,
contends that Horizon is able to run such a large farm because it
dilutes organic principles.
Earlier this year, his group filed a petition arguing that the Idaho
farm crams too many cows
into a confined area, where most of them do not graze on pasture but
instead consume a
high-grain diet.


"These factory farms are trying to cut corners," Mr. Kastel said. "When
you feed more
calorie-dense grains, you get more milk."

Horizon, which also buys milk from 305 family farms, says it is making
changes and will divide
its Idaho operation into two separate farms so that there will be three
to five cows for each
acre of pasture.

"We want to meet the regulations," said Kelly O'Shea, Horizon's
director of government and
industry relations, "and see integrity in the organic standards."

The National Organic Standards Board has been trying to persuade the
Agriculture Department to
clarify its vague rule that to produce organic milk, dairy cows,
besides receiving only organic
feed and avoiding growth hormones and antibiotics, must have "access to
pasture." It wants to
require that milk labeled organic come from cows that get at least 30
percent of their diet from
pasture grass for a minimum of 120 days a year.

Mr. Kastel of Cornucopia estimates that roughly 30 percent of the
organic milk sold in the
United States comes from cows that are not on pasture, most of them
from two large dairies
run by Aurora Organic Dairy, an offshoot of what was once the country's
largest conventional
dairy company. Organic milk is the most popular organic product and
sells for up to twice the
price of regular milk.

On a recent visit to Aurora's farm in Platteville, Colo., at the foot
of the Rocky Mountains,
thousands of Holsteins were seen confined to grassless, dirt-lined pens
and eating from a long
trough filled with 55 percent hay and 45 percent grains, mostly corn
and soybeans.

Of the 5,200 cows on the farm, just a few hundred - those between
milking cycles or near the
end of their lactation - were sitting or grazing on small patches of
pasture.

Aurora executives say that despite the lack of pasture, their cows are
"very healthy and
happy." The 10 million gallons of milk the farm produces each year are
supplied mainly to
supermarkets and sold under store brands like Safeway Select, Kirkland
at Costco and Archer
Farms at Target.

Mark Retzloff, president of Aurora Organic, said he did not agree with
the National Organic Standards Board's proposed pasture rule, but added
that he was planning to add 550 acres of grazing land to the farm. The
company is also building a new dairy in a layout that Mr. Retzloff said
would be conducive to putting thousands of cows on pasture and still
milking them three times a day.
Such tensions are likely to remain whatever the new legislation allows.
Sheryl O'Laughlin, chief executive of Clif Bar, which makes organic
energy bars, says that while the difficulty of operating organically and
finding natural ingredients often ends up raising production costs, it
is also what gives the category its purity and its appeal.
"The organic industry,"

Ms. O'Laughlin said, "has got to put pressure on itself to find
alternative solutions."




  • [Livingontheland] What Is Organic? Powerful Players Want a Say, Tradingpost, 12/05/2005

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