Organic Consumers Association has opened a new front in their culture war against science - now they say organic food itself is too science-y.

Don't they represent organic farmers? No. Unlike Organic Trade Association, the mainstream trade group created to help organic corporations gain market share, Organic Consumers Association is a fringe group that was created to tear down science they oppose on ideological grounds. They just wrap themselves in the flag of the burgeoning organic movement. They are not for anything, they are instead against any science a client will pay them to be against.

They don't just attack regular farming, they are weirdly opposed to vaccines, affordable energy, and any chemical that magic soap companies pay them to oppose.



They even created puppet sites like U.S. Right To Know so those organizations could draw fire for helping the Russians propangandize against American science by coying up to outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik - using them as a shield, OCA cannot directly be implicated.

Now they have turned on organic farmers, the way mobs of conflicting activists who are always looking for new houses to burn down end up torching the homes of innocents.


Ronnie Cummins, chief angry guy at OCA, looks like this a lot. Credit: Deniers For Hire 

Their latest target is synthetic processes in organic farming. Synthetic ingredients in organic food are no secret. There are dozens and dozens of synthetic ingredients allowed in organic food, all at the request of the organic proponents that populate the National Organic Standards Board inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was a group created to enable marketing of the organic process, and they have done a fine job, revenue for their clients is up 5000% since the label became official in 2000. (1)

Life should be good. Not to Organic Consumers Association. Quiet success is bad for their business, and a drop in revenue is a call to arms. If organic farmers won't pay them, they'll try and turn the screws. And that is where attacking synthetic processes come in. Organic shoppers claim to care more about maintaining healthy soil than farmers. What about food that uses no soil at all, and is therefore terrific for maintaining healthy soil? Organic Consumers Association is against it. And the 2018 Farm Bill which, while not perfect (what bill ever is?) is important to American consumers and the farmers who feed all of us? OCA hates it, because their trial lawyers want to make money suing and settling with USDA, like NRDC and Center for Biological Diversity do with EPA, Fish and Willdlife, and others. Right now, NOSB temporarily allows synthetic ingredients until an organic equivalent might ever be available. OCA wants to eliminate that too. 



This development is bad for organic farmers, who have the luxury of being able to charge higher prices but face the stigma of needing chemicals in greater quantity; modern compounds were created because older ones didn't work well but were far more toxic than modern weedkillers like glyphosate. The key organic pesticide is copper sulfate - and it's all synthetically produced.  OCA is against using no soil because soil was mentioned in the organic Bible written in the 1940s, and are against synthetic processes in food grown in dirt. They don't even know enough science to realize their vital organic pesticide is a synthetically produced chemical. They are lobbying to put organic farmers out of business completely.

Yet another study has shown that organic farming leads to far more emissions due to lower yields,  which means more land and more forests cut down to appeal to wealthy elites in cities. The last thing organic farmers need on top of that is attacks from the inside, and especially from groups they disavow, like Organic Consumers Association. 

NOTE:

(1) Though in achieving that breathtaking increase and turning themselves into Big Food organic corporations have done exactly what President Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman, did not want done to regular farming when he approved the first label. "Let me be clear about one thing. The organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety, nor is 'organic' a value judgment about nutrition or quality.”