The magazine of Peter Gillhams Natural Vitality

JANFEB 2011JANFEB 2011ConnectionsOrganic

Frances Moore LappBuilding a Living Democracy

Organic Report 2011Where Organic Is and Where Its Going

Andrew KimbrellThe Role of Organic in Food Safety

Frances Moore LappBuilding a Living Democracy

Organic Report 2011Where Organic Is and Where Its Going

Andrew KimbrellThe Role of Organic in Food Safety

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In this issue

If youre proactive about living a healthy life and desire the same for your family, friends and others, todays America forces you into the role of an activist. Now, Im a child of the sixties, so this comes fairly naturally to me. But when you have to fight over not

getting poisoned or sick or genetically modified by the food you eat, and the government giving free rein to chemical, biotech and food companies to conduct human biological experiments on us for profit, youve got to wonder what the hell is going on? (pardon my French).

When corporations became people in the eyes of the law in the late 1800s, they began using vast accumulated wealth to influence elections and create powerful industry lobbies to craft public policy favoring their interests. This has been a part of American capitalism for generations. The economic meltdown were currently living through is a tragic demonstration of the harm this can cause. Government by and for the people has been replaced by government by and for the corporate people. This perversion of democracy has negatively impacted our lives for so long, most of us were born into a world that operates in this wise and grudgingly accept it as normal life.

When the arms race was in full swing back in the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission assured one and all that atmospheric testing was perfectly safe. Times have changed but the song remains the same. Todays atomic bomb tests have been replaced by geneti-cally modified food, toxic pesticide cocktails and unregulated nano-technologyall, our government assures us, perfectly safe.

The stakes are high. Were dealing with our health, our children and our environment. Wethe actual peoplewant safe, healthy food and a sustainable environment. The corporate people want profits and strong quarterly and annual reports. These two value sets become opposed only when profits are obtained at the expense of the health and welfare of citizens and our planet.

The sad truth is that people getting sick actually adds to the bottom line of our economy. It sustains the insurance business, keeps doctors busy, fills hospitals, is a windfall for Big Pharma and their research scientists, and is good for drugstores (and mortuaries).

You and I are living in an economic framework that has no consideration for quality of life. The GNP and other related indexes simply measure the well-being of corporate people. If we want it another way, wethe actual living peoplehave to change the game.

Ken Whitmanpublisher

Whos doing what towhom and why

4 Frances Moore Lapp Renowned author, educator, speaker and activist Frances Moore Lapp talks with Organic Connections about the underlying factors standing between the world in which we now live and the world we all want.

7 Organic Report 2011Organic Connections put together a panel of leading experts from the Organic Trade Association, The Organic Center and the Organic Farming Research Foundation to determine the current state of our battle for a healthier world.

Andrew Kimbrell Public interest attorney, author and executive director of the Center for Food Safety Andrew Kimbrell looks at the flaws in our food system and talks about what makes organic so important at this time.

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organic |r ganik|

denoting a relation between elements of something such that they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole: the organic unity of the integral work of art characterized by continuous or natural develop-ment: companies expand as much by acquisition as by organic growth.

2011 Peter Gillhams Natural Vitality. All rights reserved.

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4 o r g a n i c c o n n e c t i o n s

We are surrounded by many serious environ-mental, health and economic issues: climate change, an unhealthy and dominating indus-trial food system, a depressed economy and spiraling poverty, to touch on a few. Some signs of change are evident, yet its still easy to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks remaining.

Renowned author, educator, speaker and activist Frances Moore Lapp has confronted core issues like these for many years. The author of some 18 books, among them the international bestseller Diet for a Small Planet, she is the co-founder of three organizations, including Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy and, more recently, the Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education seeking to bring democracy to life, which she leads with her daughter, Anna Lapp. Frances and her daughter also co-founded the Small Planet Fund, which channels resources to democratic social movements worldwide.

In her latest book, Getting a Grip 2, she takes an in-depth look at the underlying factors standing between the world in which we now live and the world we all want.

Digging to the Root

Despite the worlds many problems, Lapp has managed to view them as challenges and to continue to offer unique and practical solutions. She attributes this to her native thriving curiosity.

Curiosity has driven my life, in the sense that my life is about asking the question behind the question, Lapp tells Organic

Connections. As I started out I asked: Why is there hunger in the world? But soon my question became, Why is there hunger in a world where there is plenty of food? And then it grew to become the vastly bigger question: Why are we as societies creating a world that none of us as individuals would ever choose? My questions get bigger and bigger, but what keeps me going is the feeling that, no matter what, Im not shying away from the most im-portant questions.

The social problem-solving instrument that we call democracy in this country has been increasingly degraded, so that, for many people, it can now feel impossible to recog-nize and meet the challenges of this century of life on Earthchallenges like climate change, massive hunger and increasing inequal-ity. Yet at the very same time a democracy is being redefined, brought to life as a living practicefrom citizens in Latin America and elsewhere engaging in participatory budget-ing to 84,000 forest management groups in India in which villagers set and enforce rules to protect and regenerate threatened forests.

So what keeps me going is a passion for dig-ging to the underlying root and uncovering examples of a richer, more effective under-standing of democracydemocracy as a way of life, not simply a structure of government.

In Getting a Grip 2 I say that the root chal-lenge is in our heads. Its in the worldviews weve absorbed that are based on assumptions of scarcity, part of the mechanical worldview that separates each of us into our individual parts, isolated from one another.

Whos to Blame?

We increasingly withdraw for a reason, I believe, Lapp writes. We feel overpowered, not empowered. And she adds, . . . a sense of control over our lives is essential not only to mental but physical well-being.

She points out that the average citizen is placed in an extremely untenable position in terms of being able to cause change. Economi-cally the top 1 percent of householdsabout a million familiescontrols as much wealth as more than 90 percent of households put

together. Shockingly, at the same time, almost 60 percent of Americans will live in poverty for at least a year during some point in their adult lives.

This financial imbalance also relates to political power. Due to the removal of limits on campaign contributions from corpora-tions and the vast lobbying power of cor-porations (there are more than two dozen lobbyists for each person elected to represent us in Washington, and an estimated $16 mil-lion a day is spent on lobbying), governmental power is tightly controlled by the same minor-ity holding the most financial influence.

But Lapp is pointing us in a very interest-ing direction for solutionsright straight into the mirroras she lays out for Organic Connections the following example. Lets think about something that is, rightfully, outrageous to most Americans: the decep-tion, lack of transparency, and inside influ-ence on the part of our legislators, leading to lack of public oversight of the financial industry. This led not just to our countrys economic collapse but to global suffering, including the increase in worldwide hunger. That justifiably makes us angry because we are directly affected, while people in other countries had no role in it nor any way to rectify it.

Frances Moore Lapp Building a Living Democracy

by Bruce Boyers

Its easy for us, here where it all began, merely to blame. But in an ecological world-view were all connected, and if we are all con-nected, were all implicated. We certainly have to call on the carpet those who knowingly acted in our worst interest. Theres a lot of evidence now that many creating and selling risky derivatives knew what they were doing was unethical, but they went ahead and did it because other people were doing it. Many of them have admitted this. Yes, we have to in-crease the public oversight and accountability, but we also have to ask ourselves, where were we? Why did we allow the withdrawal of pub-lic oversight of the financial industry? Who was following that quote unquote Moderniza-tion Act [Financial Services Modernization Act, 1999], which was key to the unraveling of rules that had kept the financial sector ac-countable to the public interest?

We werent paying attention. A lot of us were going along in the belief that the market simply works on its own to create a demo-cratic and middle-class society.

So we have to call on those who were most implicated, but we have to say that wemean-ing the broad citizenrywere also implicated. We, especially those who would have the op-portunity to read about and follow this sort of thing, were not doing our jobs either.

In this context, Lapp highlights the value of mutual accountability. One of my favorite examples of this ethic is a group in the Pacific Northwest called the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council, which is composed of loggers, environmentalists and farmers who came together to develop a common plan for their watershed. They wore a lapel pin around town that just consisted of the word they within the circle with a diagonal line through it thats the universal symbol for no. In other words: No more they!

The acceptance of mutual accountability is part and parcel of what Lapp calls a living democracya system in which we all take part and in which were all empowered.

Believing Is Seeing

Optimistically Lapp declares, Were free to throw ourselves into the most thrilling plan-etary struggle our species has ever known. . . . It starts with seeing possibility.

The clich is seeing is believing. I say no, no, nothat in fact we cant see what we dont believe is possible. Instead I say that believing is seeing. We see what we expect to see.

In my book, I tell a story about preparing Thanksgiving dinner last year. As I was

preparing the meal, I searched high and low in every cupboard and closet for my favorite baking dish so I could start baking the root vegetables. Frustrated, I finally gave up. Much later, I turned around and there it wasonly it held a plant! Because I had framed what I was looking for as a kitchen item, not a planter, I could not see iteven though it was big, red, and right in front of me!

If we cant really define what living democracy meansa true culture, or an ecology of democracy, I sometimes call itif we cant really see it in our minds eye and believe its possible, then we wont

see it emerging right now, right in front of our noses, despite the incredible backward direction that formal democracy is taking. In her book, Lapp writes that living democ-racy is shorthand, in part, for fair play and decision making through honest dialogue that includes the voices of all affected.

Consequently, I see my work as helping people, including myself, to believe in the possibility of a living democracy, she says, so that we can then see evidence of it emerging and view ourselves, therefore, as part of it. Its also about fundamental hu-man nature: if we believe ourselves to be selfish materialists, then we behave that

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way; we see other people in the same light and that gets reinforced.

From Abundance to Scarcity

Lapp talks about her own early and pro-found economic realization. We create the scarcity we fear. My first insight as a 26-year-old came when I realized that all newspaper headlines and the experts were saying that we were right at the edge of running out of food to feed people and that famine was in-evitable. Paul Ehrlichs book [The Population Bomb] came out in 1968, and then there was a book in 1969 by the Paddock brothers called Famine 1975, predicting that in the next decade there would be massive famine be-cause of absolute limits to the earths capacity.

What changed my life was the realization that hunger was due to economic dogmaa belief system about how the market should work. The market brings the highest return to those who already have the wealth; so wealth concentrates to the point that there are a great many who dont have the economic where-withal to buy food directly. Hence, grain became so cheap that it made economic sense to feed a third of it (now almost 40 percent) to livestockfor a fraction of the nutritional return of what was fed to them.

Therefore we end up, through our belief system, actually taking vast abundance that would allow us all to eat well and shrinking it. Currently, just about half of the worlds grain goes directly to people and the rest goes to livestock and to other usesagrofuel is one of them. Think about it: we have a planet with almost a billion hungry people and yet only half the worlds grain is allocated to feeding the entire population.

Direct Involvement

So, how do we take back our power to act on our values? We have allowed a huge degree of concentration of power in our political sys-tem, Lapp says. This brings the challenge back to, how are we taking responsibility for creating a decision-making structure that includes us and works for us?

A first step is getting money out of elections and, particularly, getting corporate money out of elections. We as a people have to get di-rectly involved in reclaiming our political de-mocracy. We have to make this core challenge just as sexy as farmers markets and school gardens; weve got to make it every bit as real and fun to get involved and just as much of a movement of the heart as the civil rights

movement or that for gender equity. That means a democracy not of money (which it has been) but of people.

And it can be done! Lapp counsels. In Getting a Grip 2 I tell the story of my hero, Deb Simpson, in Maine. In 2000 she was a single mom, a waitress with a high school education. Friends spotted leadership in her and encour-aged her to run for office. She was elected, then re-elected, to Maines House of Repre-sentatives. She now serves in the state senate, where she sits on the Natural Resources Committee. This was able to happen because Maine has effectively gotten money out of elections80 percent of the legislators in the state assembly in Maine have run without corporate money. Because the people said no to corporate money in politics, Maine has been able to pass groundbreaking environ-mental legislation. There is now federal legis-lation in Congress based on the Maine model, the Fair Elections Now Act, which has 166 co-sponsors in the House at this point.

The World That We Want

Those of us involved in trying to create a sus-tainable food system know where we have to go. Lapp demonstrates how her methodol-ogy ties in with these objectives.

The approach Ive been talking about ap-plies to any and everything we are doing to create the world that we want. Being part of the food movement could potentially touch each of the three course changers I discuss in my book: a monopoly market to a democratic market; a culture of victims and blamers to a culture of empowerment and mutuality; and a politics driven by money to a politics driven by citizens values. Certainly the culture of the food movement offers us the chance to solve the middle onefrom victim to problem solver. Food is emotional and deeply personal. We all eat and everybody loves to think and talk about food. Its a common meeting place where we can take direct responsibility for our lives and for our childrens futures through all the different venues that are opening in terms of gardening, community gardens, school gardens, farmers markets, CSAs, and on and on. The cultural change that I talk about in Getting a Grip 2 can, I hope, reinforce all those involved in the local, healthy food movement to say, This is not just a nice thing to do; this is part of building a living democracy.

But in whatever were doing that is part of the food movement, we can also weigh in on the other two course changers as well. Along the theme of getting money out

ofand getting citizens voices intoour political system, it doesnt take much time to learn what you need to know about fair elections: elections free of corporate money. Take the Fair Elections Now Act (www.fair electionsnow.org). Just read about the basics of the approach and weigh in with your own congressperson through a telephone call; or, it just takes a couple of minutes to send an e-mail or a letter. You dont have to derail yourself from your particular curiosity or pas-sion to understand how fair elections, free of corporate influence, are essential to creating the larger context in which the food move-ment can thrive. No matter how many com-munity gardens we create, as long as there is a handful of food manufacturers who spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to our children, and who infiltrate our minds and appetites through that advertising and through the ubiquitous availability of that food, we will never reach our goals.

What I am saying is we can feel strength-ened by working both ends, so we know our personal community actions arent detached but are connected to changing the deeper structures that have turned our food system into a health hazard for millions. We can be following our own curiosity to specific and local engagement, and at the same time deepening our broader contextual awareness instead of letting that wider context disem-power and depress us. We can see the inter-ventions we can make that wouldnt take up all our timefar from it. We can be players in the bigger picture and feel powerful enough to then take that feeling back into our families and into our community actions.

Im not asking people who are beautifully and powerfully focused on transforming our food system to divert from that to changing how money works in politics; but I am saying, with very little of our time, we can include this in a way that is not a burden but is really empowering. Partly its just informing each other that there is a way to get our political democracy back and providing the number to call or the e-mail through which to weigh in.

In conclusion, Lapp sums it up: Living democracydemocracy as an invigorating way of lifeis no longer something done tous or for us but a way of living together that we ourselves shape.

You can order Getting a Grip 2 from the Organic Connections bookstore.

Find out more about Frances Moore Lapp and read her blog at www.smallplanet.org.

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News has surfaced about the dangers of pes-ticides remaining in purchased comestibles, and food-related health issues such as diabe-tes and obesity have become so prominent that even First Lady Michelle Obama has become involved. All of these factors have led a growing number of consumers to seek out food that is safer and more nutritious; summed into one word, that means organic.

To get a more detailed look at where we stand in our battle for a healthier world,

Organic Connections sat down with three of the leading experts in the organic industry. To these individuals their work is not sim-ply a job; its a crusade and even a lifestyle.

Our Panel of Experts

Christine Bushway is the executive direc-tor of the Organic Trade Association, a membership-based business association for the organic industry in North America.

OTAs mission is to promote and protect organic trade to benefit the environment, farmers, the public and the economy. They represent businesses across the organic supply chain, including food, fiber/textiles, personal care products, and new sectors as they develop.

From her position, Christine has a clear view of the goals of the industry and the bar-riers it faces. I grew up in a home where it was really stressed that how and what you ate was really important, Christine told Organic Connections. When I was in college, organic was kind of a hippie thing. The book Diet for a Small Planet was all the rage, and I was very intrigued; so way back then I started changing the way I was eating. With the OTA, Ive really come to understand what it is that organic delivers to the con-sumer. In the spring, the Presidents Cancer Panel report was released and it discussed the importance of consumers avoiding pes-ticides, because we have a 41 percent cancer rate in this country. I like to call that report a self-help document that consumers can use to really assist with the promotion of their own health, and I think thats what organic enables people to do.

Dr. Charles Benbrook is the chief scientist with The Organic Center, a non-profit organization with the mission of generating and advancing credible science relating to the health and environmental benefits of organic food and farming.

Ive been working on the interface of agricultural production systems, food safety, public health and the environment for 30-plus years, Charles told Organic Connections.

For me, organic begins at a very personal level. I run my body pretty hard, and because

The organic industry has gone through major expansion in the last few years, fueled by a steadily increasing awareness of the importance of real food.

REPORT 2011

I push myself I know that its really important for me to eat a nutritious diet. My job is to try to stay on top of new science thats coming out from around the world on the impact of organic farming on food quality, as well as the impact of conventional farming systems on the quality of conventional foods. Right here at my home, we raise most of our own meat, produce our own eggs, and have a very large and productive garden. Because I have seen what this diet has done for me in terms of my energy level and my health, I want to try to help bring that to other people as well.

Bob Scowcroft is the executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, whose mission is to foster the improvement and widespread adoption of organic farm-ing systems. The OFRF sponsors organic farming research along with education and outreach projects, disseminates the results of OFRF-funded research and education projects to organic farmers and to growers interested in adopting organic production systems, and educates the public and decision makers about organic farming issues.

Ive been working on organic foodrelated issues for 32 years, Bob told Organic Connec-tions. I started out in the very late seventies working at Friends of the Earth, trying to assist the team to ban Agent Orange. In that initial process I ran into a couple of organic farmers who somewhat laughingly and also very seriously said, You know, there are 7,000, 8,000 different pesticides and herbicides out there. Why dont you just be for something that doesnt use any of them? That really made sense to me, and is what ultimately led to my helping form the OFRF and my work with them.

Supporting organic eliminates chemicals and impacts all the different sectors of our natural environment. Also very important to me are the family farmers that are the main component of organic, and their ability to farm profitably using organic protocol. And lastly, at home, our family eats organicwere largely in the high 90 percent range of every-thing organic. We even have organic T-shirts.

The Big Questions

To formulate a state of the union for the organic industry, we put some key questions to our panel of experts. Their answers are both enlightening and, ultimately, encouraging.

Is there a greater consumer demand for organic produce and organic proteins than in the past?

Christine Bushway: US families are buying more organic products than ever beforeand from a wider variety of categories. This is ac-cording to findings from the latest consumer study jointly sponsored by the Organic Trade Association and KIWI magazine.

Bob Scowcroft: The growth of organic in 2010 came in between 5 and 6 percent of the overall food system. Certain sectorscarrots, grapes, fresh salad mixes, things like thatare exceeding 10 percent. There are reasons why this is growing; some of it is economy of scale. I think a portion is the result of stories about atrazine and methyl bromide; there are some incredibly toxic chemicals out there that are becoming known by name in the public consciousness. There is also a lot of concern and ever more attention being paid to genetically engineered crops and the fact that organic bans them and does not allow these in their system. I think such elements will attract a widening consumer base.

Will organic producers be able to keep up with the demand?

Christine Bushway: A lot of this depends on specific crops and regions. OTA continues to support funding from the USDA for such programs as the Organic Certification Cost-Share Program (to help defray a portion of the costs for farmers to be certified) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which provides funds to reward organic farmers for conservation practices as well as technical assistance to transition to organic. These types of programs encourage farmers to be organic, which, in turn, will mean more organic products in the market-place. In addition, there are other programs to encourage more organic production. Whole Foods Market, for instance, offers a local-producer loan program, which pro-vides up to $10 million in low-interest loans to small local producers, including organic producers. It does so because it believes in supporting local farmers and producers and helping them produce more organic products to meet demand.

Charles Benbrook: Currently, some produc-ers are keeping up during parts of the year; however, theres no question but that there are shortages of many itemsparticularly perishable itemsduring the parts of the year when crops are not being actively harvested in North America. I think there is less of an issue with shortages of products that store well, like grains, even butter.

Another factor is that there was a certain amount of land available in the last five years that had not been actively farmed and had not been sprayed with any chemicals or treated with any prohibited fertilizers. But supply of that land, particularly land that is reasonably productive and can be brought into an existing organic farm operation with-out a lot of capital investment, is quite modest at this point.

To offset this, in the coming year and in the years ahead, one of the new trends we will see is greater effort by US farmers and food companies to meet the demand for particular fruits and vegetables outside of the traditional production and harvest season by offering consumers frozen, canned and dried fruits that are organic and very high quality.

I believe most of the growth in organic production is going to come from conven-tional farms that have already shifted some of their acres to organic, but are going to shift more. Im talking about commercial-scale farms, and I think its entirely possible that in this next decade there will be many thousand-plus-acre conventional farms that end up putting most or all of their land through the transition.

Bob Scowcroft: I would say the answer de-pends upon which sector, which commodity and which region. There have been particular challenges over the years with protein that comes out of poultry and meat. The infra-structure is very concentrated in conven-tional agricultural meat-producing factories; and to run an organic system requires mobile slaughter units, storage capacity, cold storage, distribution networks, and an interface with a federal regulatory system that is designed to only inspect 10,000 head a week slaughtered and 300,000 a year feedlot animal operations. On top of all that, theyre doing an incredibly poor job of it.

Nevertheless, on the upside, were just beginning to see under this administra-tions Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program more regional food hubs, better support, and even some grants for the construction and approval of more mo-bile slaughter units. Were seeing federally inspected slaughter facilities supporting small family farms that might have 200 hogs and 80 head of cattle and grazing land, and we didnt really see that until this ad-ministration. The bottom line, as now and always, will be food safety; so we need food safety legislation to be recalibrated to allow for a more collaborative and more intensive monitoring of organic standards to permit

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I see farmers markets as a completely positive new developmentbut farmers markets can only deliver and satisfy a certain amount of annual food needs of Americans. We still need to develop an organic food industry to provide food for everyone.

The challenge remains to help consumers understand the many benefits of organic products and to differentiate these values in the marketplace.

those products to move through the system very efficiently.

Are more farms going organic?

Christine Bushway: The US Department of Agricultures Economic Research Service gathers information from the accredited cer-tification agencies to track how many farms have become certified organic and how many acres are involved. This information is only available through 2008, but it shows that, yes, more farms are going organic.

Bob Scowcroft: Its only in the last two years that a division of USDA called the Ag Census published, using a number of the questions we employed in the nineties as a non-profit, a significant batch of data on the state of organic farmers and farming in the United States; and this has shown that the number of organic farmers has expanded.

Farmers markets are growing and are increasingly popular. Many of the farm-ers are not certified organic but dont use chemicals or toxic sprays. How do these farmers fit in with the organic movement, or do they?

Christine Bushway: Under the National Organic Program, farmers who use organic practices but are not certified can sell their products as organic without penalty if they sell less than $5,000 in product a year. Consumers can ask the farmers to show them paperwork verifying that they actually farm organically. Farmers who sell more than $5,000 a year must be certified in order to sell their products as organic. Thus, those who are eliminating the use of chemicals or toxic sprays can communi-cate to consumers that they are employing methods that eliminate this use but cannot claim they are organic.

Charles Benbrook: They fit in great. Theres certainly no conflict or tension between the large commercial organic farmers and farmers who are selling their produce at the farmers market. I think the farmers markets are going to continue to grow and become a more significant outlet and source of fresh fruits and vegetables during the production season in those parts of the country where people have access to them. I see farmers markets as a completely positive new developmentbut farmers markets can only deliver and satisfy a certain amount

of annual food needs of Americans. We still need to develop an organic food industry to provide food for everyone.

Bob Scowcroft: Organic has always been a volunteer proposition; no one has ever made anyone choose the word. If you do choose to use it, then there is the statutory power behind it and rules and regulations you must follow. When it gets to the farmers market level, there are any number of producers that for a rainbow variety of reasons do or dont choose to use the term. No longer can you just write it on a piece of cardboard, however. If you want to use another term and avoid the word, you have every right to do so.

What is going to happen with organics in the next one to five years?

Christine Bushway: Organic sales continued to grow during 2010 despite the challenges of the economy, and are projected to keep grow-ing in the next five years. As more scientific studies begin to confirm that the attributes of organic products address many concerns of the day (depleted soils, climate change, the neurological effects of toxic and persistent pesticides on children, as well as links to can-cer and other diseases), the organic industry will have more good messages to tell consum-ers. The challenge remains to help consumers understand the many benefits of organic products and to differentiate these values in the marketplace.

Charles Benbrook: I believe theres going to be a strong recovery of the leading companies. There is every reason to project that consumer demand for organic food will accelerate, and the growth rate is going to accelerate as we come out of the recession.

A lot of pressure can be expected from the public to clean up the food supply and reduce the frequency of exposures to pes-ticides, animal drugs, food additives, and other constituents in food that are impli-cated in health problems.

There is a virtual avalanche of new sci-ence coming out strengthening the case that dietary modification is now the single most important step that the average American needs to take to improve his or her health. Twenty years ago that statement would have been about reducing smoking; ten years ago it would have referred to HIV/AIDS; today I think, without question, that modifying what we eat is the most important health goal in the United States.

Bob Scowcroft: I am sure organic is going to grow. It has some potential to grow dramati-cally when it comes to the consumer who has had it with food that causes medical problems. Were going to see an ever increas-ing number of consumers whove connected the dots between carcinogens in our envi-ronment and their parts per million in their food; and were also going to see an economy of scale, which some organic producers are already beating, that allows for entry into more of the nations markets.

Organic has every opportunity if we get a fair sharejust a fair share; thats all we want. If were 6 percent of the food system, we want 6 percent of all the resources provided by the government, which includes the Farm Bill, crop insurance, trained agricultural extension agents, and land grants for organic sciences. If we get those from the govern-ment, we can watch these 20,000-odd farmers go to 40,000. If we manage our imports into the country with standardized certification protocol, organic could be easily 15 to 20 percent of the economy. I have no qualms with saying that we could get to half of our food systems being organic in the next decade or two if we really put our shoulders to the plow.

For more information from the Organic Trade Association, visit www.ota.com. For more on The Organic Center, and to access their many studies, visit www.organic-center.org. To get further information on the Organic Farming Research Foundation, visit www.ofrf.org.

Were going to see an ever increasing number of consumers whove connected the dots between carcinogens in our environment and their parts per million in their food; and were also going to see an economy of scale, which some organic producers are already beating, that allows for entry into more of the nations markets.

If you were ever looking for an advocate when it comes to food safety, you couldnt do any better than Andrew Kimbrell. He is a

public interest attorney, activist and author. He has been on the front lines of public interest legal activity in technology, human health and the environment for most of his adult life. In 1997 he established the Center for Food Safety, and he currently serves as its executive director. This organization is responsible for knocking down effort after effort of biotechnology giants to pollute our agricultureand endanger our healthwith GMOs, and is directly challenging other harmful technologies such as food irradiation and nanotechnology.

Kimbrell is also a renowned speaker and has been featured in documentaries and on

radio and television programs across the country, including The Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, Crossfire, Headlines on Trial and Good Morning America. He has lectured at dozens of universities through-out the country and has testified before congressional and regulatory hearings.

Kimbrell recently sat down with Organic Connections to give a laser-sharp insight into our food system, and what part the organic industry truly plays in changing our future.

Problems of Industrial Agriculture

Alarming reports occur regularly in the media, such as the spinach E. coli scare. The disease has also shown up numerous times in meats shipped to fast-food outlets. Kimbrell points out that through such disparate reports in the media, the public at large, as well as legislators, fail to grasp the actual issueand its scope.

What we constantly see is a failure of the media and of policymakers to really say, The problem here is industrial agriculture, Kim-brell told Organic Connections. They want us to see these events as scary isolated incidents instead of indicators of how dangerous and

unsustainable our industrial food system has become. The sleight of hand is to try to treat each incident in its own isolation and not understand that theyre all connected to the larger systemic failures and problems of industrial agriculture.

A huge number of the food safety issues come from the factory farm system. Because you have animals in such close, confined and unnatural conditions, youre creating a situa-tion in which E. colia marvelous and benefi-cial bacteria in its natural settingturns into a killer because of the mutations that happen in these factory farms. Just like anything else, even with human beings, when you crowd a lot of things in the same area youre going to get your flus and your plagues. With these food safety issues, were seeing a direct result of the spread of industrial agriculture and the inhumane way in which we treat the 10 bil-lion animals that we use every year for food.

The factory farm system has also resulted in vast areas of land being used to grow a single crop, such as corna process called monocul-turing. As any farmer will tell you, it has huge implications for the crops themselves.

You get your monocultures and you have 10,000 acres of the same crop versus a di-versity of crops, Kimbrell said. Of course once you have the monocultures, in come the weeds, in come the insects, and so you have all your pests. Thats when you get an explosion of herbicides and pesticidesafter World War II especiallyand thence comes the whole problem we have with industrial farming.

o r g a n i c c o n n e c t i o n s 13

Andrew Kimbrell The Role of Organic in

I food safety

14 o r g a n i c c o n n e c t i o n s

Perpetuating the Problem

In examining the magnitude of the prob-lem, one would be hard put to figure out how such issues have continued for so long without punitive legislation or some sort of government intervention. The reason? The extremely powerful food lobby and the en-trenched power of agribusiness.

If you look at larger issues on Capitol Hill, almost all the agriculture committees in Congress, and certainly at the state level, have been stuffed with folks who are pretty much in the pocket of agribusiness, Kimbrell observed. Frankly, in my experience, the USDA should be called the US Department

of Agribusiness, not the US Department of Agriculture, because what they have success-fully done for way too long is take the culture out of agriculture and put business in there.

But the problem extends beyond simply placing the right people on the right posts. Actual regulation of our food system has taken such a low priority that the various government agencies themselves are crippled, and getting any changes made from the out-side becomes nearly impossible.

Just speaking as a guy whos spent a lot of time on the Hill, it is ridiculous on a straight efficiency level to have the kind of fragmented food safety regimes that we have at the vari-ous agencies, Kimbrell said. For example, if you want to have a certified humane meat, you go to the USDA. If its eggs, you go to the FDA. In genetic engineering, Bt plants (plants engineered to contain the natural pesticide

Bacillus thuringiensis) are considered pesti-cides, so they go to the EPA; but crops geneti-cally modified as herbicide tolerant go to the USDA. You have these agency splitsone little part of the agency here and one little part of the agency thereall mixed up between USDA, EPA and FDA.

The solution is so obvious that it would seem those in power must be doing their level best not to notice.

In a similar way to Homeland Security, what you really need is to take all of the food functions out of those agencies and put them into one food agency, said Kimbrell. Given the importance of food, why in the world do we have to link it with drugs and the FDA?

Almost every FDA commissioner forever, including the current one, Peggy Hamburg, has been the drug person, not the food per-son. Food becomes the second fiddle and has for years at the FDA. Food doesnt have its own agency, and yet what is more critical than food and water? So we obviously should have a dedicated agency that combines and makes far more efficient use of all of the vari-ous subagencies that are fighting with each other for funding, that are not coordinating, and that often have very different kinds of philosophies because there are different cul-tures within these agencies. It was discussed early on in the Obama administration, but it unfortunately was dropped.

Youre not talking serious food safety until you have a dedicated agency devoted to food and food production. We currently have a totally broken food safety system. The band-aids in the present Food Safety Bill are insuf-ficient. We need to get serious about this, and at least then we will have a coherent potential for some progress in the field.

The Vital Role of Organic

While fighting to bring our current industrial food system under control, it is equally im-portant to bring the organic industry to the fore in society.

Food is the most intimate relationship we have with the environment, Kimbrell contin-ued. Along with breathing and drinking, it is

the most critical relationship we have around survival. So I think it is not simply an issue of safety or an issue of personal healthit goes beyond that. Looking at the future of food and food production in the twenty-first cen-tury, one gets an excellent indicator of what direction our entire societynot to mention civilizationis going.

Building the House

The mantra of CFS is Organic and Beyondnot Organic or Beyond but Organic andBeyond, Kimbrell said. We fought very hard for many years to get the organic rule itself. We consider it the beachhead, and now we need to defend the standards and evolve the ethic. We have organicbut organic shouldnt be the ceiling of the food future; it should be the floor, maybe the basement. Above that you want to build a house that is local, appropriate scale, humane, socially just and biodiverse. There are indications of humane in the organic rules, for example, but they dont specifically address and sig-nificantly argue those other issues. And so the critical point is howthrough market pres-sure, through premiums, through public and private cooperationcan we then develop that house above that floor?

Also, if organic is the floor of this house were building, then the methods prohibited under organicwhich include GMOs, sew-age sludge and irradiationshouldnt be there at all. We fight the elimination of those

Youre not talking serious food safety until you have a dedicated agency devoted to food and food

production. We currently have a totally brokenfood safety system.

What makes organic so importantand not just in the food fight, but actually for our entireconsciousness as people at this particular historical momentis that its one of the few places where

saying no to certain technologies equals progress.

and the other prohibited methods, including of course pesticides and other chemical in-puts, because all of that should be the floor of American agriculture, not some niche market on top; all of that should just be the basis of how we do business.

Redefining Progress

Kimbrell explains that our very definition of progress has helped land us in the situation were now in.

When you think about it, for almost 400 years in the West we have equated progress with an ever greater ability to manipulate and control nature, he said. What makes organic so importantand not just in the food fight, but actually for our entire consciousness as people at this particular historical momentis that its one of the few places where saying no to certain technologies equals progress. Progress means working in partnership and participation with nature, rather than ever greater manipulation and exploitation of nature. By saying no to pesticides, fertilizers, GMOs, irradiations and sewage sludge, were saying no to the greatest technologies of modernity. Were saying no to the chemical,

nuclear and biotechnology revolutions that were equated with progress for so long. Its actually not progress; progress means devel-oping a more sustainable, humane and just way for that terribly important thing we call food production.

Its historic. It would be similar to some-thing like natural childbirth. There are a few others that are like that, where people have said progress means saying no. But organic

is indeed progress. If you go to any college campus and ask, Is organic progress? theyll say yes; theyll tell you that organic food is a more progressive way to be and to live.

Our Role...as Creators

Kimbrell goes out of his way to express his disdain for the term consumers and to stress that each and every one of us in the organic industryfrom the shopper up to the farmer, manufacturer and distributorhas a vitally important role.

I really stay away from the word consumer, Kimbrell said. You know, fires consume. They used to call tuberculosis consumptionbecause it wasted away the bodies of its vic-tims. If you have any sort of poetic or mytho-logical feel for life, you know thats just not a great way to think of ourselves. When I have a wonderful meal, I dont consume itI enjoy it; I savor it.

So I believe, rather than consumersand this is particularly true of those of us in the organic movementin every aspect were creators. I think we should look at our food decisions of what we grow, what we sell, what we buy and what we eat as creative

decisions. Every one of those decisions will create a new food future one way or another.

Its very important that those of us who have devoted so much of our lives to the organic movement realize that were at the forefront of a larger shift in consciousness. Its the same shift that were going to need to see in energy, in transportation, in econom-ics and in law. Its part of a larger change, a

redefining of ourselves as a species to live in harmony with the natural world and our fellow creatures. Organic is right there at the edge of that consciousness shift, and it makes it a very exciting place to be. I think thats why people feel so empowered, just even the average member of the public who is buying the food or growing the food, as well as those who are selling the food and those of us who are protecting against the prohibited methods. The exciting thing is that we feel empowered to make those decisions and to know were at that particular time in history, opening a door to a new way of thinking.

To find out more about the many activities of the Center for Food Safety, visit their website at www.truefoodnow.org.

o r g a n i c c o n n e c t i o n s 15

Its very important that those of us who have devoted

so much of our lives to the organic movementrealize that were at the forefront of a largershift in consciousness.

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