Make ‘Organic’ Mean It

For years, major farming companies laughed at the organic movement. Then the kooky pioneers of organic agriculture made it an $11-billion-a-year industry, and other companies wanted a piece of the premium prices that organic foods command in the grocery store. Problem is, they didn’t always want to go to the added expense and trouble of actually producing organic food.

For a while this spring, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman was going too far toward accommodation, with a series of directives that would weaken organic standards to the point where consumers might wonder whether the organic label meant much except higher prices. After producing the new guidelines in April with neither public comment nor input from her own department’s National Organics Standards Board, Veneman was greeted with plenty of angry input from consumers, organic farmers and members of Congress. Last week, she withdrew the ill-considered rules and vowed to come up with new ones the right way.

Organic standards do need some fine-tuning. It’s unclear, for example, whether a dairy cow can be given antibiotics for illness and still be considered to give organic milk after a waiting period. It is also difficult to decide seafood rules.

But Veneman would have allowed meat to be called organic when the cattle had been fed non-organic fish meal that might have contained preservatives or toxic chemicals. She would have expanded the use of pesticides on “organic” produce. A third Veneman idea: Settle the seafood issue by calling all of it organic. That would have made for comedy at the fish counter, where the organic label for farmed salmon could go next to the signs warning that salmon is artificially colored. Pet food and body-care products could sport “organic” labels while meeting no standards, a virtual license to print money.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture had defended the weakened standards earlier by saying the agency lacked the time and money to bother consulting the public or its own advisory board. Veneman’s decision to rethink the rules with the board’s input brings to mind that old saw: “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, do you have time to do it again?”