[Scpg] The Organic Foods Movement - Led by Heinz Corporation or We the People? The Time to Choose is Now

[Faramarz Nabavi]

Yet another reason that can show people why they need to get involved and
"grow organic," not just "buy organic," and that there's a big difference
between buying from a farmers' market vs. a large chain (but everyone on
this permaculture list knows that already). I was aware of this trend, but
the completeness of the corporate giants' takeover of organic brands
surprised even me!


http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views04/0531-11.htm

Published on Monday, May 31, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Organic Foods Movement - Led by Heinz Corporation or We the People?
The Time to Choose is Now

by Paul Cienfuegos

In the past few weeks, the USDA has once again attempted to weaken the
federal organics standards that so many Americans have worked hard to
enshrine into federal law. These changes would have allowed food labeled
as "USDA Organic" to contain hormones and antibiotics in dairy cattle,
pesticides on produce and potentially contaminated fishmeal as feed for
livestock. As happened with a number of other outrageous recent USDA
actions, citizens groups and the organic food industry rallied in
opposition, and were successful in reversing the proposed changes.

The newest round of protests against such changes reminds us of the more
than 200,000 letters Americans sent to the USDA back in 1997/98 pleading
with the agency to not allow toxic sludge, irradiated food, and GMOs to be
included in a list of allowable food growing practices for the then-new
federal organic food regulations. The USDA backed down then as well, in
the face of the outpouring of public opinion. It seems we have won again.
Or have we?

Could it be that handing regulatory authority over to the USDA regarding
organic foods creates a larger problem than it solves? And is it
conceivable that this problem could have been averted entirely if we the
people had thought more critically about our safe food movement's own
decision-making processes?

Let's review the history.

In the 1970s, the owners of many small local farms and food production
companies realized that they needed a new standard of food production that
would prohibit a wide variety of toxic processes from ever coming in
contact with their foods. These local free-thinking individuals got
together and drafted a set of proposed organic food standards designed to
become law at the state level. No big food companies came out to oppose or
weaken the legislation, because at the time, these companies hadn't yet
envisioned the tremendous profitability of what has since become one of
the fastest growing sectors of the entire American economy - organic food
products.

State standards worked well in every state in which they were established.
There was only one real problem with this new system. Because organic
certification rules were slightly different from state to state, organic
food growers and producers had to be aware of these variations in order to
be able to market their products in every state. In states without their
own standards, an organic product could be sold as such as long as it was
certified by one of the other states' certifiers. But in spite of this
difficulty, the organic industry grew rapidly; product choice kept
expanding. The system worked.

If everything was humming along so smoothly, then why did more than
200,000 Americans write letters to the USDA in 1997/98 begging them to not
allow GMOs, irradiation and toxic sludge as fertilizer on organic farms?
As with so many other tragic stories we could be telling, this one also
involves we the people handing our sovereignty over to a bunch of
corporations - only this time they were organic food corporations with
names like Cascadian Farm, Santa Cruz Organics, Hain, Muir Glen, Little
Bear, and many others. And their owners had a similar goal to those of
Monsanto's owners - ever increasing sales and profits.

State-based organic food certification might have worked just fine for an
organics movement whose goals centered around public health and a
sustainable economy, and whose leadership continued to be small-scale
farmers and producers, and safe food advocates.

But unfortunately, the safe food movement's numerous and diverse
farmer-led and other organizations of the 1970s and 80s gradually ceded
organic food policy decision-making authority to a small number of much
more centralized organizations whose leaders (and/or funders) now included
or were entirely comprised of organic food corporation representatives.
And these corporate leaders had a different set of goals.

So the sad reality is that we no longer have a strong and united movement
of grassroots citizens organizations working together to create an organic
food system for this country. Instead, we primarily have a "national
consumer watchdog group" (the Organic Consumers Association, OCA) which
defines its constituents as mere consumers who yearn only for safe foods
to vote for with their dollars, and a business organization (the Organic
Trade Association, OTA) whose members include "growers, shippers,
processors, certifiers, farmer associations, brokers, manufacturers,
consultants, distributors and retailers" - in the US, Canada, and Mexico -
working primarily to protect and expand its profitability in the global
marketplace. And for this, we do need federal organic standards.

Notice, by the way, the lack of attention to the concerns of farm workers
by either organization. They are invisible, though there are hundreds of
thousands of them.

To fully realize the danger of our current situation, you merely have to
view a list of the giant agribusiness corporations that are clamoring to
get in on the organic foods market action, which at the current growth
rate will constitute 10 percent of American agriculture by the year 2010.
These huge companies now own most of the organic industry's leading
brands.

* General Mills owns Muir Glen and Cascadian Farm

* Heinz owns Hain, Breadshop, Arrowhead Mills, Garden of Eatin', Farm
Foods, Imagine Rice (and Soy) Dream, Casbah, Health Valley, DeBoles, Nile
Spice, Celestial Seasonings, Westbrae, Westsoy, Little Bear, Walnut Acres,
Shari Ann's, Mountain Sun, and Millina's Finest

* M&M-Mars owns Seeds of Change

* Coca-Cola owns Odwalla

* Kellogg owns Kashi, Morningstar Farms, and Sunrise Organic

* Philip Morris/Kraft owns Boca Foods and Back to Nature

* Tyson owns Nature's Farm Organic

* ConAgra owns LightLife

* Danone owns Stonyfield Farm

* Dean owns White Wave Silk, Alta Dena, Horizon, and The Organic Cow of
Vermont

* Unilever owns Ben and Jerry's

And the list goes on and on and on.

And who (or what) leads the Organic Trade Association, which continues to
play a leading role in the development of organic food legislation and
policy-making? The board of directors includes employees of Whole Foods
Market, Weetabix Canada, Stonyfield Farm, and Horizon companies. And the
primary funding for the OTA's public policy and media advocacy work comes
from Hain Celestial Group (i.e. Heinz Corp), Horizon Organic (i.e. Dean
Corp), Cascadia Farm (i.e. General Mills Corp), Stonyfield Farm (i.e.
Danone Corp), Tyson Foods, and many others.

Is the corporate leadership and funding of the OTA having an impact on its
ability to maintain organizational integrity? You bet! At its annual
convention in Texas, it hosted a panel discussion about whether organic
and biotech agriculture can co-exist. Perhaps a better use of member time
would have been a panel on the need for a ban on genetically modified
organisms in the food supply, and how to achieve it. The fact that General
Mills Corporation is a major donor may have had something to do with this.
And last July, the OTA's Personal Care Task Force decided not to reappoint
member company Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, the largest seller of natural
soap in the U.S. According to several members, the company is being
removed for speaking out against watering down standards for body care
products.

Has anyone asked those small-scale food producers who launched this
extraordinary organic foods movement back in the 1970's what they think
about their movement (if you can even honestly still call it a movement)
now being funded and led by a long list of giant corporations? The very
nature of the modern corporate capitalist economy necessitates companies
growing larger and larger in order to compete. Is this really the business
model that the organic foods movement supports? In this democratic
society, is this really the best we can do?

At this point, one has to ask a number of perhaps not-so-obvious
questions: If we the people had never allowed our organic food
corporations to take control of our safe food movement's policy-making
processes (via such groups as the OTA and the National Organic Standards
Board), would we have lobbied to replace state-based certification with
federal USDA certification? And if we had not turned this decision-making
authority over to our corporations, would more than 200,000 concerned
citizens have had to write letters to the USDA? Would we now be in the
unenviable situation where we are continually on the defensive against the
USDA's ongoing attempts to drive a tank through our new federal organics
standards? Can social movement processes survive when corporations
(including ally corporations) are given a political voice? Did it not
occur to the safe food movement's leadership that our corporations might
one day end up being owned by much larger agribusiness corporations that
still wanted a seat at our policy-making tables?

When citizens unconsciously delegate their rightful decision-making
authority to the corporate form of doing business, and when corporations
wield Bill of Rights protections as "corporate persons," how can we
possibly maintain any semblance of control over the key societal decisions
which affect us all? How can we even honestly claim that the U.S. is a
democratic society when we the people struggle to differentiate between a
citizens' organization responsive to its members and committed to a
specific set of goals relating to justice, fairness, or ecological sanity;
and a trade association whose primary goal is maximizing market share?
What is it going to take for the organic foods "movement" in this country
- what's left of it - to recognize the threat posed by turning its
decision-making authority over to organic foods corporations which are
themselves owned by much larger corporations?

The situation in other countries is less serious, since their safe food
advocacy groups are still led by citizens, not corporations. For example,
the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM)
represents 570 member organizations in more than 100 countries. Its
mission is "Leading, uniting and assisting the organic movement in its
full diversity." IFOAM is "a democratic federation with all fundamental
decisions taken at its general assemblies, where its World Board is also
elected. It encourages farm workers to play an active role, which you'll
never hear from the OTA or OCA.

The US does still have hundreds of grassroots citizen groups working on
safe food issues. They are networked together through the National
Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (NCSA) which "is dedicated to
educating the public on the importance of a sustainable food and
agriculture system that is economically viable, environmentally sound,
socially just, and humane." Constituencies represented include "family
farms, rural and urban communities, environmental and wildlife advocates,
faith-based institutions, minority farmers, farmworker and social justice
groups, community food security activists, and advocates for the humane
treatment of animals."

Notice that this is not a consumer alliance. These hundreds of member
organizations are made up of people who define themselves as citizens
using democratic processes to further their goals. Some of these groups
include: Baton Rouge Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance, Comte
de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas--Farmworker Support Committee,
Community Nutrition Institute, Family Farm Defenders, Georgia Poultry
Justice Alliance, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association,
Missouri Farmers Union, National Catholic Rural Life Conference, Oregon
Tilth, Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Cooperative, United Methodist
General Board of Church and Society, Western Organization of Resource
Councils, and Women, Food and Agriculture. The OCA and OTA are also
members of this network.

Wouldn't you prefer your organic food legislation to be enshrined by state
legislatures, and safeguarded by hundreds of thousands of real
flesh-and-blood human beings who make up a strong interwoven national
network of grassroots organizations and small farms like the ones
mentioned above, rather than placing your trust in the hands (!?) of
corporate "persons" which have been empowered to lead an international
trade association, plus a federal agency corrupted by agribusiness? It's a
no-brainer!

Perhaps the time has come for organic food advocates to admit that a huge
strategic mistake has been made due to the fact that we have wandered so
far from our literal roots. And that the best solution to this growing
crisis is for thousands of us to stand together as citizens (rather than
isolated as consumers) and insist that our organic food promoting
organizations' leaders work with us to regain control of our movement from
corporations of all kinds from this day forward by:

* Acknowledging our enormous mistake.

* Empowering only flesh-and-blood persons - not corporate persons - to
participate in our movement's own policy decision making groups. (Let's
show the nation how democratic decision making should be done by
disempowering the supposed "right" to free-speech that corporate
personhood has established under law, and which has so effectively
devastated we the people's ability to take charge.)

* Withdrawing our support for USDA-defined and regulated organics
standards, and returning to the old state standards. (If it ain't broke,
don't fix it!)

* Insisting that the US pull out of all global trade treaties and
processes which are not entirely transparent and democratic in their
decision making structures.

* Working diligently to see ourselves again primarily as citizens who all
have an inherent right to a safe food supply, rather than as mere
consumers who vote with our dollars. (Imagine organic food advocates
beginning to question the acceptability of a two-tier food supply in this
country, where those of us who can afford to do so buy organic, and the
rest of us eat irradiated and genetically modified food dosed with toxic
chemicals. Imagine hundreds of grassroots groups working together to end
this travesty.)

We have reached a critical moment in our nation's history. Are we up to
the task?

Paul Cienfuegos co-founded Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, and
currently chairs the City of Arcata Committee on Democracy and
Corporations. He first chimed in on this topic in 1997 with his published
essay, "The USDA Organics Standards as a Symptom of Corporate Rule". Paul
also owns an unusual online bookstore: www.100fires.com . This essay will
appear in an upcoming book on dismantling corporate rule, which he is
co-authoring with Betsy Barnum, fellow of the Center for Prosperity in
Minnesota. More info: cienfuegos at igc.org