President-elect Barack Obama launched his campaign in Iowa with a promise to create genuine opportunity for rural people and family farmers. Obama proposed changing the failed rural policy of Washington by capping payments to megafarms and enforcing rules against unfair practices by meat packers to strengthen family farms. To revitalize rural communities, he proposed investing in small business development and value added agriculture.

Now, Obama has announced he will appoint former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Vilsack must embrace the goals set forth during the campaign.

Now, you can urge Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to carry through on the policies Obama campaigned on. Sign this grassroots letter to Secretary Vilsack and add your own comment about the change you want to see in farm, food and rural community policy. We will deliver your signatures to Secretary Vilsack early in 2009.

To read and sign the letter, vist the website for the Center for Rural Affairs.

When it comes to sizing up the purity of the honey you buy, you’re pretty much on your own.

You may be paying more for honey labeled “certified organic” or feel reassured by the “USDA Grade A” seal, but the truth is, there are few federal standards for honey, no government certification and no consequences for making false claims.

For American-made honey, the “organic” boast, experts say, is highly suspect. Beekeepers may be doing their part, but honeybees have a foraging range of several miles, exposing them to pesticides, fertilizers and pollutants on their way back to the hive.

And while they’re required to put the country of origin on the label–a fact that could help guide wary consumers–some honey producers don’t bother.

The head of one major honey company advises caution and warns that in the United States there’s confusion over label terminology and inconsistent enforcement of labeling laws.

“There is honey out there that is illegally and purposely mislabeled, an adulterated product that is very difficult to stop,” said Dwight Stoller, chief executive of Kansas-based Golden Heritage Foods. “There’s probably not a lot, but it’s still a real issue and consumers must be aware of that.”

Unless a shopper buys honey from a farmers market, where they can talk to the person who raised the bees and bottled the honey, they’re relying on what’s printed on the label.

Major supermarkets offer dozens of different brands, sizes, types and flavors of honey for sale. Consumers might walk away with the finest-tasting, highest-quality honey there is. Or they could end up with an unlabeled blend, adulterated with impossible-to-detect cheap sweeteners or illegal antibiotics.

Part of this is because of the government’s failure to define what true honey is, but the blame also goes to a handful of sleazy honey packers who buy and sell cut-rate foreign honey, which usually has little problem slipping past overstretched customs inspectors.

The Seattle P-I surveyed 60 honey products commonly sold in the Pacific Northwest and found glowing praises of healthfulness, sincere promises of quality and an endless selection of advertising adjectives touting honey as the true elixir.

“100% Pure.” “U.S. Grade A Pure.” “U.S. Grade 1.” “America’s Best Honey.” “U.S. Choice.” “Natural and Pure.”

The list goes on and on, but it’s mostly hype, experts say.

“If somebody puts ‘U.S. Grade A’ on there, who’s going to say it isn’t?” said Harriet Behar, outreach coordinator with the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service. “There’s no enforcement, so people can say whatever they want.”

The government takes a minor role in the grading of honey. It’s left entirely up to the industry.

Stoller was the only one willing to discuss it openly. His company, with beekeeping roots going back 90 years, is one of the nation’s largest suppliers of honey to retail outlets, the food-processing industry and food service and restaurant-supply companies.

The government, he said, doesn’t have the resources to set and enforce needed standards. And that leads to inaccurate or misleading labeling.

“Some packers just slap on whatever they feel like,” he said. “Whatever they believe will attract the shopper to their product.”

Where things really get sticky is the selling of “organic” honey–sold in some form by every major chain.

Government, academic and industry experts insist that U.S. organic honey is a myth. With rare exceptions, this country is too developed and uses too many agricultural and industrial chemicals to allow for the production of organic honey.

“Like other foods from free-roaming, wild creatures, it is difficult–and in some places impossible–to assure that honey bees have not come in contact with prohibited substances, like pesticides,” said Chuck Benbrook, chief scientist for the Organic Center, a national advocacy group for the research and promotion of organic food.

Recent U.S. Department of Agriculture research, he said, shows that the average hive contains traces of five or more pesticide residues.

Arthur Harvey of the International Association of Organic Inspectors, who doubles as a Maine beekeeper, said two factors must be considered when attempting to produce organic honey: what the beekeeper puts into the hive, such as chemicals or medication of any kind; and the location of the hive.

Can the bee fly to a place that can be a source of potential contamination?

Harvey shares the concerns of many that there are no real USDA standards for organic honey.

“What USDA has said is that you can certify any product as organic as long as you comply with existing regulation, but there are no regulations for honey,” he said. “That means the green USDA organic sticker on honey is meaningless.”

Across the globe, there are 30 different, wide-ranging certification standards for organic honey, but there’s no way for inspectors to detect fraud, Harvey said. The USDA, he said, has never levied a fine for a violation of organic rules–for honey or any other product.

The Naturally Preferred honey brand, widely distributed by the Kroger supermarket chain, has a USDA seal on the front label. On the back, it boasts, “Certified Organic by the Washington State Department of Agriculture.”

Not so, say state officials.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture doesn’t certify honey “because we have no standards for organic honey,” said agency spokesman Mike Louisell.

“It shouldn’t have WSDA on its label,” he said, “because we don’t do it.”

Jerry Hayes, chief of the apiary section for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, said there are no organic standards for honey in the United States because honeybees forage in a 2 to 2 1/2-mile radius of their colonies.

“They’re flying dust mops and will pick up unbelievable amounts of environmental contaminants,” Hayes said.

Unlike most states, Florida has 15 full-time inspectors, a lab and other resources dedicated to ensuring honey quality, and the state is poised to do what the federal government hasn’t–pass a law defining what honey is.

Consumers stand to benefit, said Dr. Marion Aller, who heads Florida’s food safety division.

“This will make enforcement of food safety easier,” he said.

Aller said the honey industry supports the move because it’s increasingly concerned that products touted as “pure” actually may be cut with other sugars or syrups.

Washington has no apiculture inspectors, largely because there isn’t the budget for it.

Claudia Coles, food safety manager for the Agriculture Department, said her staff inspects Washington’s honey producers for sanitary practices only, as it does with 1,700 other licensed food processors statewide.

“But the quality analysis of honey - determining what’s really in the bottle - isn’t something we have funding for,” she said. “We struggle first with issues of E. coli, pathogens that make people sick with acute illnesses.”

Some U.S. producers say they’re confident offering certain foreign organic honeys to the public.

Mike Ingalls, president of Pure Foods Inc. in Sultan, recently stood beside a stack of brown steel drums in his warehouse. It’s all marked “Organic Honey” and “Product of Argentina” - and each drum carries a sticker with a tracking number.

“I can use that number to track the honey back to the supplier in Argentina and the specific beehives in latitude and longitude and degrees, minutes and seconds,” he said, “so I can plot precisely where those hives were, and that they were at least six miles away from any cultivated crop.”

While Canada also produces some authentic organic honey, Ingalls said that product is currently in short supply so he’s had to turn to South American imports.

As for the domestic variety, he added: “We don’t produce any organic honey in the United States.”

The industry hopes Florida’s proposed honey standard is adopted by other states and the USDA.

If so, it may provide law enforcement the tools it needs to stop the flood of adulterated honey products.

Honey brokers and scientists say that not only is Chinese honey being laundered in other countries to avoid stiff U.S. tariffs and inspections, but also it’s being sold as “malt sweetener,” “blended syrup” and “rice syrup.”

Florida’s inspectors say some honey exported from China and India is put through an ultra-filtration process that is meant to remove contaminants. Honey is heavily diluted with water, then repeatedly boiled and filtered until it returns to a more natural consistency. Those who have tested and tasted the filtered brew said the process can completely remove all traces of contaminants, “including the color.”

But there’s a downside.

“In the process of taking out the chemicals, they also take out all the good qualities of the honey. What the consumer is left with is a very low-quality, sweet product–but certainly not honey,” said Mark Brady, president of the American Honey Producers Association.

“If it is cheap and packers can use it to blend into other dark, cheap honey to make it lighter in color and taste a tad better, the ignorant general consumer is none the wiser. Caveat emptor,” he warned.

A warning consumers should be getting, but often don’t, is a disclosure of where their honey came from.

Federal law requires that the country of origin be printed on food labels, but many companies offer no clue.

Nondisclosing companies range from small producers, such as Haggen Honey, distributed from Bellingham, Wash., and Anna’s Honey, distributed by Seattle Gourmet Foods, to national distributors such as Target and Wal-Mart.

A Target spokeswoman wouldn’t disclose where the discount retailer’s honey came from. But she said the Market Pantry Grade A honey “meets all USDA and FDA inspection standards.”

Linda Brown Blakley, a Wal-Mart senior spokesperson, said it’s her “understanding” that “if the honey is produced domestically, country of origin need not be included on the label.”

However, USDA says honey is considered a “perishable agricultural commodity” and country of origin is required.

The label on Heins Organic Trail Honey, packaged by Pure Foods, errs on the side of overdisclosure, listing five countries of origin: U.S., Canada, China, Argentina and Australia. Ingalls, however, said that, too, isn’t exactly right: He no longer imports from China and is just using up old labels.

Besides its certified organic claims, Kroger’s Naturally Preferred honey also carries the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

That puzzles honey experts such as Behar.

“I don’t know how Good Housekeeping can do this. They don’t know anything about honey standards,” she said.

Good Housekeeping–a magazine owned by Hearst, the P-I’s parent company–confirmed that, in 2005, Naturally Preferred honey qualified for the seal, a status that expired last month.

A magazine spokesperson said food products considered for the seal of approval are evaluated for nutritional value based on “federal, standard guidelines.”

The USDA, however, said it doesn’t have such standards for honey.

Consumer advocates warn shoppers not to put too much stock in seals of approval–or even claims that the supermarket product with “honey” in the name actually contains any.

Pringles’ Honey Buttered Wheat Stix, for example, doesn’t list honey among its 30-plus ingredients.

A company representative said the snack is made in Thailand and contains artificial honey flavoring, not real honey. “We call it ‘honey butter’ because that’s what it tastes like,” she said.

Honey Graham Crackers do contain honey–it’s on the ingredient list after sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Ditto for Nabisco’s Honey Maid Grahams and 16 other brands of “honey” crackers, snacks and cereals the P-I inspected.

Paul van Westendorp, the provincial apiculturist for British Columbia’s Ministry of Agriculture, said that in Canada, there are renewed calls to tighten the regulations of honey labeling.

“The erosion of the label ‘honey’ has been going on for decades and beekeepers have often been frustrated by the big food processors such as General Mills, Kellogg’s and many others for using honey in their product-line advertising while the product contains little or no honey,” he said.

“Is the consumer getting cheated? That depends entirely on what the label says. The difference, of course, is that this type of product is typically sold to the . . . uninformed consumer.”

That practice is commonplace, said Diane Dunaway, who has studied honey marketing and is editor of Bee-scene magazine, produced for Canadian beekeepers in British Columbia and elsewhere.

“It’s come down to consumers taking the time to read the ingredients list on the product label versus the marketing text,” she said.

“The folks who make Pringles aren’t the first to exploit the health-inspiring word ‘honey’ for profit. Companies like these and other food processors are relying on the dumbing down of consumer awareness,” Dunaway said.

As warm and cuddly as the honeybee is to Madison Avenue, she warned food processors to tread carefully.

“Hell hath no fury like a soccer mom scorned!”

WASHINGTON — The Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is accepting nominations for membership on the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection. The deadline to submit a nomination is Jan. 23.

The N.A.C.M.P.I. consists of 16 to 18 members and each is expected to serve a two-year term. The committee provides advice and makes recommendations regarding federal meat and poultry inspection programs and includes representatives from industry, academia, state and local government agencies, public health officials and consumer groups.

Nominations must include the nominee’s resume or curriculum vitae and should be submitted by e-mail to NACMPI@fsis.usda.gov or by mail to Mr. Alfred Almanza, Administrator, Food Safety and Inspection Service, in care of Faye Smith, Room 1175-South Building, 1400 Independence Ave., SW., Washington, D.C. 20250, or by fax to (202) 720-5704.

As 2009 approaches, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India supplies Switzerland with 80% of its wheat, 350 million Indians are food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because, according to The International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land is being lost to industrialization, urbanization and shifts to grain crops for animal feed.

Yet, according to FAO statistics, world food supplies have kept pace with population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone. Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises.

Dr. Bob Watson, chief scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK, places the blame for the food price spikes on several factors; grain being shifted to animal feed, drought, increased use of grains for biofuels and speculation in food crops. While proponents assert that industrial agriculture is the only hope to end the food crisis, it appears that industrial agriculture is *causing* the food crisis.

A study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) found, that as industrial farming practices are adopted in countries like India, small farmers and landless peasants are forced off the land. Hundreds of vegetables and weeds that were part of the traditional diet are wiped out by mono-cultures and herbicides used on the Genetically Modified (GM) crops. Thus, as Margaret Visser tells us, more rice and wheat produced in India really meant less food and less nutrition.

In 1995 Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro addressed the Society of Environmental Journalists stating “The commercial industrial technologies (the Green Revolution) that are used in agriculture today to feed the world… are not inherently sustainable.” Even Shapiro, was admitting the Green Revolution would fail. As George Kent notes in /The Political Economy of Hunger/, “the benefits of Green Revolution yields went into the mouths of rich world denizens, in the form of meat and processed foods”

IAASTD concluded that small-scale farmers in diverse ecosystems should be the focus of efforts to get better quality food in the right places. Farmers need better access to knowledge, technology and credit, but was biotechnology *the *technology ? Watson told the UK Daily Mail “Are transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no.”

Study after study indicates small scale, integrated organic/low input sustainable production can produce more food, of higher nutritional value locally, where it is needed.

A 15 year study at the Rodale Institute showed similar yields for conventionally raised vs. organic corn and soy, with soil fertility being consistently higher in the organic systems.

The Broadbalk study in the UK, ongoing for over 150 years, shows higher yields in integrated organic systems over conventional systems with soil fertility remarkably in the organic system.

In /This Organic Life/, Joan Dye Gussow notes that prior to World War II, even with its harsh climate, Montana produced 70% of its own food, including fruit. Sustainably, organically on small farms.

The advantage of integrated organic and sustainable systems is even more apparent in the Global South where most farms are an acre or less. While “yield” per acre can be higher on large conventional farms, “total output” per acre, the sum of everything the farmer produces, is according to Peter Rosset in /The Ecologist/, far higher on small farms. More food, more nutrition, more animal feed.

Gardeners are familiar with the Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash, three food crops that thrive together. This system of intercropping, has long been practiced by small scale indigenous farmers. Integrating livestock, manure and crop rotation makes the system even more productive in terms of food per acre.

According to Rosset, economists at the World Bank realize that redistribution of land to small farmers would promote greater food production, yet due to corporate and political pressure, the industrial farming model is promoted as the standard that will “feed the world.” Helena Norberg-Hodge notes that the industrial food system became dominated by the “need for corporate profits, not the need to feed the global population”.

Industrial farming has been an abysmal failure at feeding the world. The best hope, according to the IAASTD report, long term research and countless generations of indigenous farmers, lies with “small scale farmers in diverse eco-systems”.

As for the US, we need sensible food policy; less grain for animals, more home and community gardens, farmer owned grain reserves, energy policy that does not use food for fuel and an end to food price speculation. That is a “Change we can believe in”.

Jim Goodman, his wife Rebecca and brother Francis run a 45-cow organic dairy and direct market beef farm in SW Wisconsin. His farming roots trace back to his great-grandfathers immigration from Ireland during the famine and the farms original purchase in 1848. A farm activist, Jim credits over 150 years of failed farm and social policy with his motivation to advocate for a farmer controlled consumer oriented food system. Jim currently serves on the policy advisory boards for the Center for Food Safety and the Organic Consumers Association, and is board president of the Midwest Organic Services Association.

LA Times
By Don Lee and Tiffany Hsu

Reporting from Los Angeles and Shanghai — Melamine in Chinese-produced milk powder has sickened hundreds of thousands of children and added to a growing list of made-in-China foods banned across the globe. Now, some scientists and consumer advocates are raising concerns that fish from China may also be contaminated with the industrial chemical.

China is the world’s largest producer of farm-raised seafood, exporting billions of dollars worth of shrimp, catfish, tilapia, salmon and other fish. The U.S. imported about $2 billion of seafood products from China in 2007, almost double the volume of four years earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But industry experts and businesspeople in China say that melamine has been routinely added to fish and animal feed to artificially boost protein readings. And new research suggests that, unlike in cows and pigs, the edible flesh in fish that have been fed melamine contains residues of the
nitrogen-rich substance.

Melamine, commonly used in plastics and dishware, can lead to urinary problems such as kidney stones and even renal failure.

Last year, pet foods made with melamine-laced ingredients from China sickened or killed thousands of dogs and cats in the U.S. This year, infant formula tainted with the chemical has been linked to illness in 294,000 small children and six deaths in China, according to China’s Ministry of Health.
In the U.S., fish from China can be found in the frozen food aisle in supermarkets and is served in posh restaurants.

“China’s a big place, and it does a lot of processing, and cheaply too,” said Brian Dedmon, purchasing manager for the Fish King distribution plant in Burbank.

Fish King, which supplies hundreds of Southern California restaurants and has a store in Glendale, says it buys processed snow crab meat, squid and other seafood from China to meet market demand and because the price is competitive. Dedmon says the company relies on government inspections, its importers and its own experience to ensure the fish it buys is safe.

“We’re definitely concerned about melamine, but by the time the fish gets to us, health issues should’ve been taken care of by the government agencies and brokers that we go through,” he said.

Not on the checklist

But even though some U.S. fish importers are voluntarily testing for melamine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the safety of imported fish, currently doesn’t require seafood products to be screened for melamine. Yet research from its own scientists has raised a warning flag.

Laboratory studies of melamine-fed catfish, trout, tilapia and salmon by the FDA’s Animal Drugs Research Center found that fish tissues had melamine concentrations of up to 200 parts per million. That’s 80 times the maximum “tolerable” amount set by the FDA for safe consumption.

Iddya Karunasagar, a United Nations fish-product safety expert in Rome, said the FDA’s research suggested fish would have to ingest large amounts of melamine to pose a health threat to humans, something that he considered unlikely. But he said there were no data on melamine levels in Chinese-produced fish and animal feed.

Other scientists said testing of melamine in farm-raised fish from China should be made mandatory because of the dearth of information about melamine levels in Chinese feed and fish.

“That’s the problem; no one has a clue how much concentration and for how long” fish from China have ingested melamine, said Jim Riviere, director of chemical toxicology research at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “There’s an issue of relative human safety,” he said. “It would be prudent to screen for melamine.”

An FDA representative in Washington wouldn’t comment on why Chinese-produced seafood didn’t have to be analyzed for melamine when imported to the U.S. Nor were FDA researchers made available to comment on their agency’s findings, reported recently in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Research undertaken by Riviere and others show that melamine in feed consumed by pigs and cows is excreted in the urine or otherwise flushed out, leaving virtually no trace of it in the muscle or meat of the animals. But fish appear to be different,toxicologists say.

Fang Shijun, who has monitored the melamine problem for several years, says he believes that the adulterated products are being supplied only by small operators, which abound in China.

Like those who added melamine to milk and diluted it with water to increase profit, feed businesses can sell more by substituting melamine for real protein sources, especially with the cost of corn and other raw materials having soared in the last couple of years.

“It is impossible to calculate how many of them have done that,” said Fang, manager of feed research at Shanghai EFeedLink Information Technology, an agriculture consulting and research firm.

In the U.S., aqua-cultured seafood from China can be found in restaurants and in markets that sell frozen shrimp, catfish fillets and roasted eel, among other fish. U.S. importers such as Boston-based Stavis Seafoods, which sells products under the brand Foods From the Sea, are taking precautions and doing their own testing.

“It’s our reputation behind it,” company Chairman Richard Stavis said. Thus far, he said, the testing has not turned up melamine in the catfish and tilapia that Stavis buys from China.
U.S. importers have for some years been testing for a variety of antibiotics and substances, including the suspected carcinogen malachite green, which some Chinese fish farms use to control disease.

Since last year, the FDA has been restricting entry of shrimp, catfish, dace, eel and basa from China unless those shipments come with an independent lab report certifying the seafood is free of such additives. Melamine isn’t included on that list of additives.

The Chinese government, facing increasing pressure from the public, has begun to crack down on melamine suppliers and has widened inspections to include feed. And many Chinese exporters of farmed fish say government inspectors are coming around more often and examining samples.
But shipments of filthy and contaminated fish from China continue to be detained at U.S. ports, exposing holes in a food-safety system that analysts say is undermined by a lack of resources, corruption and unscrupulous businesses that will sometimes mislabel or reroute goods through other countries.

Last month, 26 containers of shrimp, crawfish, tilapia and other fish from China were refused entry in Long Beach and other U.S. seaports. Inspectors cited a variety of reasons: salmonella, unsafe additives, unapproved drugs and labeling problems, according to FDA records on its website.

U.S. consumer advocates say the FDA has its own resource issues.

“They’re so understaffed at the borders that despite whatever orders they have, we can’t be sure that products aren’t just coming through anyway,” said Jean Halloran, food policy initiatives director for Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports. “We need much better testing,” she said, including of melamine in fish.

FDA officials last month opened three offices in China, part of a strategy to deploy agency staff in countries where many U.S. foods now originate and where they can work with local inspectors and the industry.

“We cannot inspect our way to import safety; we have to roll our borders back and work with producers and have [their products] certified by people we trust,” said Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, under which the FDA operates, during a visit to China last month.

A food-source issue

Karunasagar, the U.N.’s fishery expert, said governments in China and elsewhere needed to tackle the problem at the source. “More than the fish, we should monitor melamine in the feed.”

But that’s easier said than done. In the U.S., commercial fish farms have to use feed from a handful of approved suppliers, but in China, there may be hundreds of thousands of sources for feed, said Steve Dickinson, an American attorney in China’s coastal city of Qingdao who ran a salmon-farming business in Washington state.

Melamine has “infected the whole system in China,” he said.

More than 15 feed suppliers in various parts of China were contacted for this story. Most of them declined to comment or said they didn’t add melamine. But some of them said the practice of spiking feed with it had been going on for at least the last six years, with inspectors checking some types of feed products more tightly than others.

“It is not so regulated, for example, in the fish powder industry,” said Zhuge Fulai, manager of Lianfeng Protein Feed Plant in Shandong province.

Fang, the feed research manager in Shanghai, said adulterating feed was particularly rampant in 2003 and 2004. He doubts that many feed suppliers today are adding melamine, given the awareness and the government’s publicized crackdown, but neither he nor anyone else thinks the problem has been eradicated.

“We still need more government supervision,” Fang said. “We need to have more random checks and to fully execute regulations and standards.”

Capital Press

Genetically modified crops should be tracked to ensure they’re not harming the pocketbooks of organic farmers and other growers, according to congressional investigators.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office recently released an audit report that calls on several government agencies to begin monitoring genetically engineered crops even after they’re deregulated and released into the market.

“USDA, the agency with the most comprehensive authority regarding GE crops, has no systematic program of postmarket oversight,” according to the report.

Auditors recommend that the USDA cooperate with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration to track potentially adverse environmental and economic effects of genetically engineered crops.

The report cited several possible dangers posed by such crops, such as increased pest resistance to the insecticide Bt, which is derived from Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria, and the emergence of herbicide-tolerant weeds.

Financial repercussions are also worrisome for organic and conventional farmers who sell into markets that reject genetically engineered crops, according to auditors.

“For example, some growers of non-GE crops fear that seeds or pollen containing engineered traits from neighboring fields may commingle with their crops, thereby making those crops harder to sell to customers who prefer not to consume GE products,” the report said.

The potential for economic damage from genetically engineered crops is not unprecedented, according to the report.

In the past, regulated genetically engineered crops were inadvertently released to the public, creating trade disruptions and cutting into farmer revenues, auditors said.

For example, in 2000 a variety of genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption ended up in the food supply, which reduced corn exports to Asia and resulting in a substantial price drop for the crop, according to GAO.

In 2006, a conventional rice cultivar was contaminated with genes from a regulated genetically engineered variety, shutting down exports to Europe and costing U.S. farmers up to $1 billion, the report said.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization, which represents developers of genetically engineered crops, said the GAO report disregards numerous modified varieties that were deregulated and have been safely cultivated for years.

“What that proves is that the original determinations by USDA, EPA and FDA were correct,” said Mike Wach, the group’s managing director for science and regulatory affairs. “It turns out they were right. What’s the point of revisiting that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

The GAO’s recommendation that federal agencies should monitor deregulated genetically engineered crops may indicate the auditors didn’t understand the full rigor of the deregulation process, he said.

“Maybe they thought, ‘What’s the harm in being extra safe?’” said Wach.

In reality, federal agencies thoroughly vet genetically engineered varieties before releasing them into the market, so continued monitoring would needlessly waste limited government resources and undermine the credibility of the deregulation process, he said.

“It’s just not borne out by what we see in the field,” Wach said.

Rachel Iadiciccio, spokeswoman for the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said it’s beyond her agency’s authority to track the economic effects of genetically engineered crops.

The agency can exercise only regulatory authority over noxious weed and plant pests that threaten the environment, she said.

“We’re not looking for economic harm, per se,” said Iadiciccio.

However, if a modified variety is found to pose economic threats during the agency’s environmental review process, APHIS will take those financial considerations into account, she said.

“If there is an environmental impact, then we’re required to look at economic harm,” Iadiciccio said.

Groups that oppose genetically engineered crops view the GAO report as a vindication of their position.

“There have been woefully inadequate safeguards in terms of past approval tracking,” said Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst for the Cornucopia Institute, an organic industry watchdog. “It has placed some domestic producers at a handicap in the international market.”

Kastel said the USDA and other federal agencies have been too hasty in their approval of genetically engineered crops.

“We can’t call these things back,” he said. “Once they’re released into the general environment, there’s no turning around.”

The GAO report shows that the USDA and other agencies under the Bush administration have failed to protect consumers and farmers, said Kevin Golden, attorney for the Center for Food Safety.

The activist group has sued the agency over its deregulation of genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets.

“Economics need to be a factor,” said Golden. “They need to backtrack on their denial to address economic issues.”

Deregulated biotech crops
Though corn and soybeans are the most common genetically modified crops in the U.S., a number of genetically modified crops have been approved by federal authorities. Following is a rundown of deregulated crops and their genetic modifications, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Not all have been commercialized, however, and in many cases the products were withdrawn or the GAO was unable to determine if the products ever made it to market.

www.capitalpress.biz/Pg18Chart.pdf

Staff writer Mateusz Perkowski is based in Salem, Ore. E-mail: mperkowski@capitalpress.com.

U.S. companies that make sausages, frozen pizzas, baby food and other meat-containing foods use dairy ingredients and that makes them suspect, said David Goldman, head of the office of public health science at U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. These ingredients include casein, a protein supplement, and whey. But neither the USDA nor the Food and Drug Administration knows which companies buy those ingredients domestically and which buy them from China, where children have died from melamine-contaminated dairy products.

Melamine is a toxic chemical normally used in plastics and fertilizer, but the FDA said it can also be misused to “inflate the apparent protein content” of dairy products. When consumed by humans, though, the chemical can cause kidney stones to develop.

The FDA issued an “import alert” on Nov. 12, ordering the detention of all dairy products or other foods containing dairy ingredients from China. The U.S. imported 4,162 tons of Chinese dairy products last year and 1,750 tons in the first seven months of 2008, according to data maintained by the USDA.

But the FDA does not have authority over meat, so it is up to the USDA to find out if there has been any melamine contamination.

As to what extent the domestic makers of meat products use imported Chinese ingredients and what risk those ingredients might pose to U.S. consumers, Goldman said, “we don’t have any way of knowing.”

And that, he said, is why the USDA, in conjunction with the FDA, is performing this “exploratory assessment” to get “a quick, nationwide snapshot of the extent to which - if at all - there’s a problem with melamine in our (meat) products.”

The assessment begins this week, he said. USDA employees will be pushing carts down grocery aisles, plucking pizzas, baby food, hot dogs, meatballs and other products. They will pay for them and then ship them to a laboratory in Athens, Ga., for melamine testing.

Forty five products will be collected and tested each week for 12 weeks, for a total of 540.

-By Bill Tomson, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-646-0088; bill.tomson@dowjones.com
- read online: http://news.alibaba.com/article/detail/china/100032662-1-us-relies-grocery-samples-find.html

CORNUCOPIA, WI: Some organic policy experts are asking the USDA to separate new regulations addressing the management of organic beef cattle and organic dairy cows when their final rule comes out updating the organic livestock standards.

After many years of wrangling in Washington, in response to an ongoing controversy over giant factory farms, each milking thousands of cows each and labeling their suspect milk as “organic,” the USDA published a proposed draft rule attempting to constrain factory farming scofflaws. The proposed rule is open for public comment through this coming Tuesday.

“Although we know that legal violations are taking place in feedlots, confining beef cattle instead of allowing them access to pasture, and it’s the same kind of abuse that is taking place on giant organic dairies, we are asking the USDA to engage in separate rulemaking to rein in the violations in beef production,” said Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst for the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute.

The Cornucopia’s Kastel added, “Our concern is that by incorporating new beef standards, which have never been fully discussed by the organic community, we are guaranteeing that powerful agribusiness lobbyists will do everything they can to scuttle the new proposed rules, in their entirety, delaying the long-anticipated rules on dairy.

Unlike when the USDA first engaged in rulemaking on dairy, all stakeholders, farmers, marketers, retailers and consumers, have yet to have a seat at the table discussing the beef proposal in the USDA’s new organic livestock and pasture rule.

The controversy in organic dairying centers on two of the leading marketers, Dean Foods (Horizon) and Aurora (private label for Wal-Mart, Target, Safeway and others), that are now controlling as much as 70% of the organic milk market. The two corporations have built their commanding market shares with reliance on factory farms.

“Every time we have just two companies controlling that much of an agricultural commodity farmers lose—big-time,” said Peter Harden, publisher of the monthly dairy marketing report, The Milkweed.

Over the past eight years the USDA has repeatedly failed to take enforcement action against the large controversial dairies, claiming that the current regulations were too ambiguous.

Through a series of legal complaints filed with the USDA, Cornucopia was able to establish that the current organic livestock rules were indeed enforceable by virtue of the decertification of Dean Foods’ largest independent supplier, a 10,000-cow dairy in California, and a major enforcement scandal involving Aurora in 2007, where the USDA’s investigators determined they had “willfully” violated organic law.

Cornucopia has stated they are currently involved in investigating a number of alleged improprieties at the largest suppliers of organic beef in the United States. One is Promiseland Livestock with 22,000 head, as a result of an investigation started by Cornucopia that is now working its way through the legal system. Promiseland Livestock is slated for decertification by the USDA.

“Just like organic dairy, the USDA has looked the other way while the beef sector has been built by abusing the current standards,” Kastel stated.

Some organic advocates want to tighten the current regulations for beef production assuring access to pasture for the entire grazing season for all beef cattle, just like for dairy cows. The USDA standards are currently being interpreted by the Department to allow confinement for the last few months of a cow’s life, in a feedlot, for “finishing” on corn—based on “stage of production.”

“We can’t even get the USDA to enforce the current regulations, and the Department’s interpretations, as some cows are spending almost all their lives in confinement,” said Will Fantle, Research Director at Cornucopia. “Gaming the system in this manner is repugnant, for good reason, to the most important arbiters in the industry—organic consumers.”

The primary disagreement between organic farmers right now is not whether new rules, addressing abuses on be feedlots should be promulgated. Rather, the issue is whether it should be part of this current rule package that has been driven by abuses at factory dairy farms or handled as a separate rulemaking with wide public input.

“I strongly support separating the rules for meat animals from the extremely complicated dairy issues being debated,” said Jim Munsch, a grass-based organic livestock producer and grazing consultant based in Coon Valley, Wisconsin. “The production systems are different,” Munsch explained. “Without substantially delaying the process, we must include the voices of all farmers and ranchers who understand and live these systems and who will be impacted.”

“The USDA,” according to Munsch, “took a simple issue—getting dairy cattle more pasture—and expanded it two ways. First they expanded it vertically within dairy production to include unrelated topics like bedding materials, water systems, fencing, and more. Then they expanded it horizontally to include beef animals and other ruminants without input from these sectors.”

Public comments on the current USDA draft rules can be submitted, through December 23rd, by visiting: www.regulations.gov. Citizens who have already communicated their comments should know that they can also submit updates or additional points as long as they do so before the end of the public comment period.

The Cornucopia Institute has said that there are four reasons for addressing abuses on beef feedlots in separate rulemaking:

1. Like the National Organic Coalition, and other advocacy groups, Cornucopia has long complained that the USDA has violated the statutory role of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). Addressing abuses in organic meat production should start with the NOSB and include all industry stakeholders. Bypassing the expert advisory panel set up by Congress legitimates this violation of the spirit and letter of the organic law, long abused by the USDA, and should not be supported by the public.
2. Since all important stakeholders in the organic community have not had an opportunity to discuss and organize in support of well-vetted and universally accepted rulemaking language, pushing ahead now will guarantee that agribusiness lobbyists will have a disproportionately large say in the current rulemaking. By addressing beef and other meat production separately, organic stakeholders, with less economic clout, will assuredly be able to organize a more impressive response. Moving ahead now could lead to bad rulemaking that could permanently institutionalize factory farming practices.
3. Since the draft rule is being criticized by beef production interests, if this controversy remains intertwined with the dairy provisions, it is possible that the lack of consensus could indefinitely delay the needed rulemaking designed to crack down on widespread factory dairy abuses.
4. One of the options being suggested for current rulemaking would be to allow for feedlot confinement of cattle as long as they have access to pasture. There are concerns that this recommendation, in practice, could allow industrial-scale cattle producers to pay lip service to pasture provisions without requiring true grazing of organic livestock. Without additional language giant feedlots, with thousands of cows, could have a very small scruffy pasture contiguous to the feedlot, where a tiny minority of cows actually go to ruminate. But they would be unlikely to receive significant feed intake from pasture—just like violations on some of the large poultry production facilities where birds “theoretically” have access to the outdoors, but in reality only a minute percentage ever actually go outside. (The Cornucopia Institute has an ongoing investigation into poultry production improprieties as well.)

One of the other organizations that also supports separating beef rulemaking provisions from the USDA draft rule, primarily addressing abuses in organic dairy, is the Organic Grass Fed Beef Coalition. Its president, Ken Pigors, stated, “I was amazed to see a 26-page tome, which included proposals for several new, never heard of before requirements.”

Mr. Pigors also lamented, “The one-size-fits-all misconception is glaringly evident in this document, as the Department has attempted to lump dairy cattle together with beef cattle as if they were the same critter—they are not. I suppose the book they read used the same Latin name for them both—bovine.”

Cornucopia and the Organic Grass Fed Beef Coalition have stated they are both disappointed that the Department did not hold a series of listening sessions, if proposing radical and sweeping changes to the organic standards, before the draft rule was released rather than, as the Department has done, after the fact. “It is obvious that the individuals with the highest level of expertise in raising organic livestock were not consulted when these rules were promulgated,” said Cornucopia’s Fantle.

More specifics about the USDA’s proposed pasture/livestock rule can be found on the Cornucopia web site.

“We are pleased that the NOP is taking its oversight of the nation’s certifiers more seriously,” said Will Fantle, Research Director for The Cornucopia Institute.

The nation’s 55 organic certification agents are the backbone of organic food and agriculture, guaranteeing that federal organic rules and regulations are fully, fairly and uniformly applied.

Fantle noted that two independent audits of the USDA, released in the past few years, harshly criticized the agency for failing to adequately monitor the activities of organic certifiers and ensure that certifiers were properly performing their duties. This oversight directive is one of the two key responsibilities given by Congress to the USDA.

One key deficiency found by the NOP that led to the revocation of CCIA’s accreditation was a lack of personnel with the “expertise for the certification of livestock operations.” The certifier also failed to require clients to keep updated organic production and/or handling system plans – these are essential to the annual review of certified organic operations.

The NOP is requesting that any organic operations using CCIA as their certifier quickly seek a new accredited certification agent. CCIA is barred from seeking reinstatement from the USDA for a period of three years.

Passage of the Farm Bill in 2008 provided new funds for the badly understaffed NOP and some of the funding has been used to hire additional enforcement personnel at the Program.

For more details on the CCIA revocation, visit the National Organic Program’s news page.

Morning Edition, December 18, 2008

When consumers pay top dollar for organic milk, they know they’re getting dairy that’s free of synthetic growth hormones, pesticides and antibiotics.

Now there’s a move to ensure cows are feeding on plenty of fresh grass if producers want to label the milk as organic.

Read the article and Listen to the podcast.