Inside D.C.

Corporate organic emerges

I confess I’ll likely never understand the organic food industry.  With the U.S. organic market exceeding $45 billion a year – about 5% of total food sales in the U.S. – I also don’t understand the religious zeal with which organic producers trash conventional producers in order to sell product and the assumption by organic producers that the federal government must protect the organic “premium” – the much higher price of organic – at all costs.  Witness the money in the last Farm Bill exclusive to “assisting” organic producers with everything from “getting started” to marketing product.

I’m also at a loss to explain why federal regulators don’t slam organic producers when their advertising and marketing claims go off the reservation.  Why doesn’t the organic industry step in and curb the enthusiasm of organic zealots?  Why is organic production untouchable?  Why do folks seem to think organic is so “special” when it’s simply a different production practice?

A good example of the overselling of organic is a campaign by a group called Moms Across America, I came across in Dairy Herd Management.  While I’m sure they mean well, the group set up on Earth Day 191 billboards in 35 cities in 13 states – reportedly the capital cities of Senate Agriculture Committee members – claiming “our families get better when they eat organic,” replete with illustration of pretty “mom” and cute baby eating something I assume is “organic.”  The message – conventional foods can make your kids sick; organic foods make them “better.”

Now, the cost of that campaign notwithstanding, I’m guessing whatever ad agency they used to fashion the message built it off the assumption and urban myth that organic is always and automatically safer, more nutritious and environmentally friendlier than conventional production.  The longer they can pound that message home to the public the longer they can prey on general food illiteracy to effectively frighten consumers — at least those who can afford it — into paying 50-250% more for the food they eat.

Recently I listened in disbelief to a House staffer explain to me how legislation to create a federal on-label information disclosure regimen for food containing biotech ingredients could “threaten the organic premium” if that prospective program allowed “non-GMO” labeling by federal definition.  A big organic dairy said all food was to be labeled as containing biotech ingredients or it was to be held to organic standards, there was to be no middle ground.

The organic industry is not the industry it was in 1990 when Congress first authorized a federal definition of what “organic” means.  Twenty-five years ago, organic folks were begging conventional agriculture to allow them to make food safety and/or humaneness claims for their products to justify the price.  Today, the small, independent producers – unless they can survive selling at farmers’ markets – are either consolidating or being rapidly supplanted by national and multinational food companies who like that organic “premium” and can provide to the Costcos and the Walmarts consistent product supply.

Also, the organic folks did a silly thing several years ago.  They got out of the way of private organizations creating “non-GMO” certification programs.  For a fee and if you met the criteria of these groups they’d “certify” a product as “non-GMO.”  Unfortunately for the organic folks, these products, while selling for more than conventional food products, sold for less than their organic counterparts.  Given consumers assume – I’m told – that “non-GMO” equates to organic-lite, organic started losing market to the cheaper non-GMO certified products.

Ditto the use of the labeling term “natural.”  Big companies, armed with survey data showing the term “natural” to a consumer means about the same as organic, started switching out ingredients from the more expensive organic version, dropping the USDA organic certification and labeling the products as “natural.”  Again, such products are priced higher than conventional, and have started eating into the organic “premium.”  FDA’s in the process of defining “natural” when used on human food labels, so maybe things will change – or not.

Ultimately the loser in all of these scenarios is the consumer.  They’re barraged with anti-conventional food and farmer propaganda, they pay outrageous prices for foods no safer or healthier than conventional counterparts, and they’re chumped by some companies playing games with labeling messages.  The end of an era…