USDA Passes Organics Standards

ByABC News
December 21, 2000, 2:53 PM

N E W   Y O R K, Dec. 21 -- Its official: food grown in sewage sludge can no longer be classified as Organic.After a decade of false starts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture finally passed national organic food labeling standards on Wednesday.

Current rules on organic labeling vary widely from state to state, and the USDAs first efforts at setting uniform standards about 10 years ago met with much disagreement from growers and consumer groups alike. Initially, the government agricultural group planned to allow genetically engineered and irradiated food products, as well as foods that had been grown with sewage sludge as fertilizer, to pass for organic.

The new standards ban biotech and irradiated products and govern such things as composting temperatures and feed for livestock. Foods that meet the new standards will bear a seal that reads USDA Organic, which should appear in stores by next summer.

Consumers who want to buy organic can do so with the confidence of knowing exactly what it is theyre buying, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said in announcing the rules Wednesday at a Washington D.C. press conference. They will be the strictest, most comprehensive organic standards in the world, he said.

Luring New Growers

The move is expected to lure bigger growers into the small but expanding organic food market, making the pesticide-and-chemical-free products more widely available and less expensive.

Today, organic foods are anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent more expensive than conventional food products. Despite these significant costs, the demand for organic foods has increased steadily.

The Organic Trade Association reports that the industry had $1 billion in sales in 1990 and expects $6.6 billion in sales this year. The market is astronomical, said Eric Sideman of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association in Unity, Maine.

Sideman said that in the 15 years since he started working at MOFGA the state organic market has grown almost 20-fold and estimated that the development is about the same nationwide. When I first got here we had 14 growers. Now we have 250. But Sideman says the new standards, which he has mixed feelings about because he believes they favor large-scale growers, wont necessarily impact many of Maines organic growers, who sell in-state for the most part.