Food Fascism
On March 16 1998, the US Department of Agriculture will close its consultations on a new national standard for organic farming. Its proposals have horrified small farmers, consumer groups and animal welfare campaigners. If adopted and implemented [this has happened] as protesters predict, they will outlaw genuine organic production all over the world. The USDA would allow fruit and vegetables to be labelled as "organic" in the United States which have been genetically engineered, irradiated, treated with additives and raised on contaminated sewer sludge. Under the new proposals, "organic" livestock can be housed in batteries, fed with the offal of other animals and injected with biotics. "Organic" produce, in the brave new world of American oligopoly, will be virtually indistinguishable from conventionally-toxic food.
The solution would seem to be obvious: genuine organic producers should call their food something else. But the USDA is nothing if not far-sighted. The new proposals prohibit the setting of standards higher than those established in the department. Farmers will, in other words, be forbidden by law from producing and selling good food.
The next step, if these standards are adopted in the United States, is not hard to anticipate. American manufacturers will complain to their government that the European Union is erecting unfair barriers to trade, by refusing to let them label the poisonous produce they sell here as organic food. The US Government will take the case to the Word Trade Organisation. The WTO will refer it to Codex Alimentarius, the food standards body dominated by corporate scientists. The Codex panel will decide that they cannot see any difference between American organic produce and European organic produce, and the WTO will threaten Europe with punitive sanctions if it continues to maintain the higher trading standard. This is precisely the means by which European consumers are being forced to eat beef and drink milk contaminated with injectable growth hormones.
