What is Organic?

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A hundred angry demonstrators, many of them dressed as fruits and vegetables, marched outside a downtown Seattle office building, chanting "Hi-hi, hi-ho, organic standards have to go." A Greenpeace protester stood nearby in a strawberry costume topped with a fish head. Fishberry, she called herself, as she peddled T-shirts warning of the weird and horrid new creatures that would be created if the "government got its way" and genetic engineering was unleashed on America.

This was the scene at a recent public hearing on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's proposed rules on regulating the booming organics industry. After eight years of debate, agriculture secretary Dan Glickman in December unveiled the recommendations amid great fanfare. "The rules are going to clear up the confusion that sometimes exists in the minds of consumers, processors, and merchandisers about what is and what is not organic," he said.

Instead of clearing things up, however, the proposed standards have ignited a prairie fire of opposition guaranteed to cloud the real issues facing the organic food industry.

Although organic farms make up less than 2 percent of U.S. crop acreage, sales of organically grown vegetables, dairy products, beef, and poultry have been growing 20 percent a year since the late '80s to more than $4 billion annually. But with growth has come growing pains: Well-known companies, including Dole and Glacial Ridge Foods, have faced accusations of fraudulently marketing conventionally grown, chemically treated barley, beans, apples, and bananas as organic, while certification agencies allegedly turned a blind eye. In 1996, natural juice maker Odwalla and organic lettuce grower Holly Cut Farms were implicated in E. coli poisoning incidents blamed on slipshod safety and health standards. "There's always been a bad apple or two," says Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation and former head of the Organic Trade Association (OTA), which represents 600 growers, processors, shippers, retailers, and certification organizations. "But now it's up to five or six bad apples out of every hundred."

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