[Scpg] Well, well, well

[steven sprinkel]

People ask us about the possible contamination in our irrigation water,
which is from a 220 foot well outside of Ojai. The water is likely from a
perched aquifer related to the Ventura River beginning immediately west of
us and fed by fairly pristine sources like the Matilija and the Wheeler
creeks. Approximately one thousand acres of conventional orchard production
is above us. Chemicals used there probably do affect our well, however,
because of the geology and steep surface terrain, residues flow off during
rainfall and end up in surface water and ultimately in the ocean. I drink
the well water with gusto since it seems to have the same sort of odor and
taste as any good bottled water, and the unfiltered pipe alternative, laced
with chlorine, is fairly unpalatable. This article, which I recently wrote
for ACRES ( www.acresusa.com) highlights one contaminate featured in the
news a month or so ago. Though the LIST is not usually meant for news or
editorial publication I thought I might share it since permaculture ideals
are implied in my editorial view, as one compares Big Box organic food
distribution to diversity's alternative.



T R A N S I T I O N S



by Steve Sprinkel

Ojai



July 2003



It's a dirty world and it's getting dirtier every day. The organic community
offers some sanctuary from industrial indiscretion, but few organic farmers
can promise anything absolute about food safety. A recent national news
story drives this fact home. A few weeks ago, mainstream media reported that
rocket fuel-contaminated water is used on vegetable crops on thousands of
acres-including organic ground- which drew enough attention from individual
consumers, on a broad basis, so that they specifically looked around for
food not grown where perchlorate contamination was discovered or assumed. We
corroborated our hypothesis that consumers were seeking safer produce by
calling around to farmers attending farmers markets.

" Oh yeah," one organic grower from the San Juaquin Valley said, similar to
others we spoke with. "The customers all want to know if we had heard about
it, and were we concerned and where does our water come from and do we test
for perchlorate, and is it really that bad and should they feed their kids
our produce still. We hand food over the table to these people every week,
so we take this news very seriously."

" But we are kind of in a bind on the deal because I have a good idea that
we could be contaminated since our irrigation district does obtain water we
use in irrigation that is known to contain perchlorate" he said.

 Like hundreds of the industrial chemicals imposed on the environment
through human activity, perchlorate's negative affect on human health is
undeniable. Some studies associate it with thyroid cancer. But the
regulatory debate now centers on how many parts per billion are actually
harmful. This kind of hair-splitting is a reprehensible insult to our
intelligence. Twenty-two known perchlorate sites are known to EPA, in a
number of states.

 Alexander, Hawes and Audet, a law firm specializing in perchlorate
pollution, summarizes perchlorate's most significant dangers: "perchlorate
interferes with iodine uptake by the thyroid, which regulates hormone
functions. It is especially harmful to pregnant women and infants and can
interfere with neurological development in the unborn."

Compare, for example, this kind of data with the off-the chart increase in
autism. Its not cancer, but the result is a devastating impairment
nonetheless.

This is why parents of young children and pregnant women especially are
vitally concerned.

Usually, farmers at farmers markets, utilizing CSA's and farm stands don't
have any idea if rocket fuel is contaminating their crops or not unless they
have their own well or clean surface water. The majority of organic
consumers, shopping at supermarkets, have no one to ask and probably are at
greater risk because the product at large urban chain stores is increasingly
coming from larger corporate farms which are situated where contaminated
water is used in irrigation, which is not to imply that no small organic
farms also use that same  water source.

However, this circumstance is another consequence of the way mainstreaming
organic production and distribution has played out. Instead of many farms
supplying many distributors, resulting in robust and diverse commerce, we
have fewer farms and fewer distribution sources. Consumers devoted to direct
marketing are in a better position to dodge the rocket fuel risk.

Perchlorate is found in other industrial systems other than the defense
industry, however, the military and its suppliers are the chief polluters,
both accidentally discharging it during manufacture, storage or transport,
as well as intentionally and illegally causing it to be released into the
environment. The military connection indicates why the perchlorate story
disappeared rather quickly. According to Peter Waldman, writing for the Wall
Street Journal in late April , " the Bush administration.imposed a gag order
on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from publicly discussing
perchlorate pollution, even as two new studies revealed high levels of the
rocket-fuel component may be contaminating the nation's lettuce supply."

Might as well invoke the Patriot Act, if some of that "dead-rat science" is
going to get in the way of the Air Force.  As a matter of fact, The
"National Security Readiness Act", under consideration in the US House of
Representatives, seeks broad exemptions for defense-related activity for
many long-standing environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

Environmental scientists and public health officials have grown increasingly
concerned about perchlorate as a drinking water pollutant for over ten
years. However, according to Mr. Waldman, the recent lettuce research
indicates that the crop actually accumulates perchlorate as the lettuce
grows, so that one ingests a much larger dose of the substance in one event
that would normally occur just by drinking a glass of water with seven parts
per billion in it, the level of contamination which is being found.

The EPA has been on the perchlorate trail for over five years, trying to set
a level of contamination for drinking water, and now, as Waldman suggests in
his article . "  any eventual drinking-water standard will have to be that
much stricter to account for the other sources of perchlorate exposure" (
when consuming tainted produce). One item I nearly overlooked in Waldman's
WSJ article, is that perchlorate contamination is not only related to the
rocket's red glare, but to many other minor sources like fireworks and
including Chilean fertilizers. I can think of only one product from Chile
that we don't already manufacture here. Though we prohibited Chilean nitrate
from organic production for many years for other reasons, this emerging data
should force the organic community to prohibit it again. Chilean nitrate is
a product petitioned for and overwhelmingly used on the larger, corporate
farms noted previously. The use of Chilean nitrate is still a principal,
line-item question in organic certification because it may not be used on
crops for export.

Alexander, Hawes and Audet, the law firm noted above, with offices in San
Jose, California, is preparing to sue perchlorate polluters, possibly the
Olin Corporation, a Defense Department supplier. Both the law firm and Olin
are located in Santa Clara County, where some wells have been condemned
because of high levels of perchlorate. The law firm bases their case not on
diseases that can be attributed to the contamination, but instead they have
taken a faster route towards remediation and compensation by asserting that
owners of land within the contamination zone have suffered a loss of
property value because the stigma of pollution can dramatically impact the
probability of sale as well as the ultimate price paid.

Although the rules governing organic livestock have now reverted to proper
form, the meddling nature of the feds arises in a story that should have
gotten broader play much earlier but was overshadowed by the blow-up caused
when Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, sought to undo the organic feed
restrictions in February.

Last fall, when Country Hen, a Massachusetts egg producer was denied organic
certification by their certifier, the producer jumped right to the USDA, who
overturned the certifier's decision and granted certified organic status.
The compliance issue was about access to the outdoors, and by relaxing the
limitations, not a pleasing, nor surprising,  precedent for the feds to set,
because the concept of humane treatment for livestock      ( and the real
health benefits they derive from it) has not been very easy for
conventionally-minded regulators to wrap their minds around. Writing
recently in the newsletter of the Organic Farming Research Foundation
(OFRF), Jack Kittredge of the North East Organic Farming Association ( NOFA)
and earlier Marian Burros of the New York Times covered this story, which
appears to be on-going after many months. Kittredge reports that the
producer is still marketing cartons with the seal of the certifier,
Massachusetts Independent Certifiers on them. So far, what is left
unresolved is the statutory authority that USDA utilized in order to quickly
out-flank the certifier. The Organic Foods Production Act requires a
petition process that includes the certifier in the proceedings, and it is
not lawful for the Agriculture Department to overrule the certifier and
grant certification. The USDA manages accreditation, not certification, and
serves as an arbiter when a certified party has a legitimate case. Folks at
USDA could have intuited that the still-fuzzy parameters governing livestock
management was not the best subject to flex its dubious power over.

We are glad to note that ACRES is not alone in published criticism of the
USDA's management of the National Organic Program. The OFRF newsletter also
offers an article by Joe Mendelson, the Legal Director at the Center for
Food Safety, which has fought for strong organic standards for over a
decade. Both the Mendelson and Kittredge articles underscore what we have
been braying for awhile now: that the National Organic Program is being
designed so that the agribusiness model is accommodated, with many features
normally encountered on 'factory farms' approved. Likewise, processing and
handling materials that the authorizing legislation prohibited, are now
condoned. Regulatory slight-of-hand, such as the exclusion of 'food contact
susbstances' ( addressed here a few months ago, and heavily criticized by
Kittredge) now emerges as probably the most devious means to undermine the
legitimacy of the federal definition of organic.

The production standards issues that are raised by Kittredge would not be so
easily overlooked at USDA if the government had by now empowered a Peer
Review Panel for certifier accreditation, a point very well taken by
Mendelson.

Moreover, the NOP staff  have lately steamrollered additions to the National
List by providing a scant ten day public comment period. At the end of May,
our friends at the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture were
blasting out advisories across the US, requesting that activists in the
organic community ardently pursue a thirty day extension to the latest list
of materials.

We look at it this way: the government is beginning to act more and more
like a business; a very scary, rapacious thing somewhat like a utility
because the public sustains it through coercion. We know the attrition of
fair and free governance has been a long time in building. But the grand
scope of brash executive power, the unfettered insanity of ignoring nature,
the stillness in which these obvious crimes are rammed down our throats are
most amazing, don't you think?

The government has its pet subsidiaries, like polluters in the defense
industry spilling perchlorate around with impunity, and Monsanto's
unregulated genetically modified agriculture of the future, contaminating
seed stocks, feed stocks and the food supply. So why should the beast
husband organic farming with love and hopeful expectation? The real money
backing this takeover would probably be happy to see us gone. The little
runt is nothing but a nuisance to the system's favorite corporations, and
those environmentalists eat nothing but that organic stuff. Organic is worse
than a  non-performing asset, it's a competitor with immense upside,
critical consumer acceptance, and a threat to those that produce and process
conventional food as well as the huge sector provisioning it with toxic
supplies. Organic needs to be slowed down, watered down and cut down. Kill
it before it grows.