Follow-up on Organic Foods

I wanted to follow up on my earlier entry on the sneak attack on federal organic food standards by Georgia Republican congressman Nathan Deal(Read It Here).

For all you over-the-top political junkies out there, here is the actual text he had inserted into the federal spending bill passed on February 13, 2003:

Sec. 771. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to require that a farm satisfy section 2110(c)(1) of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (7 U.S.C. 6509(c)(1)) in order to be certified under such Act as an organic farm with respect to the livestock produced on the farm unless the report prepared by the Secretary of Agriculture pursuant to the recommendations contained in the joint explanatory statement of the Managers on the Law 107-171 (House Conference Report 107-424, pages 672-673) confirms the commercial availability of organically produced feed, at no more than twice the cost of conventionally produced feed, to meet current market demands."

What this says in ordinary language is that meat and poultry producers can label their beef and chicken 'organic' even if it is not, and the government can't do a thing about it. Representative Deal snuck this into the budget bill to help out a poultry producer in his state that wants to cash in on the growing market for organic food without having to actually pay the extra money to make its chicken organic.

You can read more about this in my earlier entry and also HERE. Bills have been introduced in both the Senate (bill S-457) and the House of Representatives (bill HR-955) to have Deal's dirty work undone, but at present both bills are still sitting in committee. Please write, fax, email or phone your legislators to urge them to pass these bills. Help in doing so can be found at both the links above.