January 27, 2023
See this little sticker. It’s worth a lot of money and starting in march the government is cracking down on it.
The USDA has just proposed even stricter rules about what can and cannot be called organic.
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You may or may not know – Congress passed a law back in 1990 to determine what is and is not organic. Generally – if you farm with natural substances you get an organic sticker, and if you use synthetic substances when you farm, you get no sticker. It’s actually way more complicated than that – I’ll explain in a second.
But back to congress – they established these rules 30 years ago for a really good reason. To set a national standard and also help all of us be confident in what we’re getting when we go to the store and buy something that says USDA organic.
And that little label is *big* business. According to the Organic Trade Association, Americans spent more than $63 billion on organic food in 2021 alone.
We all know when we buy the organic apple it’s going to cost a lot more than the regular apple. So when the business is that lucrative – you know there are people trying to cheat the system to get their own slice of that organic apple.
And that’s why the USDA just proposed even stricter rules. So that it can close what some in the industry call “loopholes” that have allowed some non-organic ingredients to sneak into the organic food supply chain and have lead to a sometimes chaotic system where tracing the product to actually see if it’s organic becomes almost impossible.
Generally – to get the sticker and be called USDA organic you have to meet the follow guidelines. Obviously, you can’t use any of these synthetic substances in the growing process. This is the actual federal code that lists all of them. The product has to be grown with natural substances, and from the moment it’s planted to the time it gets to the grocery store – it has to follow a strict chain of custody through certified suppliers, transporters, processers and the list goes on. It is really complicated and the product changes hands a lot. And when there are a lot of hands in something, the organic ball gets dropped and all of a sudden the USDA says products produced organically can get mixed up with other non-organic products. And don’t even get me started on how hard the product is to trace when the supplier is international.
But it’s not just supply chain mishandling – the USDA says over the years there’s been a lot of fraud in the organic industry – like deceptive representation, sales or labeling of nonorganic products as organic.
So because of all that – the USDA is doing four main things to crack down. — tightening up the organic control systems, improving the oversight of organic products imported from other countries, making sure those who wants to use the USDA organic label understands how to get certified up and down the supply chain and enhancing the ability for the government to trace those organic products throughout the complicated supply chain.
The organic trade organization has been fighting to get these changes for years. Others in the organic community say the USDA isn’t going far enough.
Regardless – everyone in the organic food industry must comply with these new struct rules by march 19th.
Read the USDA rules changes here.
Read the statement from the Organic Trade Association’s response to these changes here.
See how much money Americans spend on organic food here.
List of prohibited substances for organic foods here.
Read USDA’s Organic 101 briefing paper here.
