National Organic Standards: Truth or Fiction?

When I step up to the personal care section of my local grocery and I see an item labeled "organic," my first impulse is to buy it over the non-organic product. My second impulse is to justify the higher price, believing that item to be the healthier choice for myself, and my family.

If I am not mistaken, this is the general mindset of today's consumer. To be concerned about health has become a trend that many consider a worthy expense.  As testimony to this trend are the huge corporate chains of 'natural' foods stores sweeping the country. In response to American's desire to live a cleaner, healthier life, to discriminate between synthetic and natural, huge manufacturing companies have flooded the market with "organic" and "natural" products.

Is it the least bit ironic that many of these giant manufacturers have begun incorporating the term "organic" into their company names and their marketing ploys? It seems to make sense, strictly from a business point of view, that this trend has attracted the attention of corporate giants whose compasses detect an opportunity to increase profits through exploitation of that simple little word. 

Never before has the term organic racked up so many consumer dollars. We as a society continue to shop with the impulse to buy healthier products from a market we blindly trust, and we have inadvertently supported the growth of a huge body of manufacturers whose first priority is not our health, but their profit margin, which would be adversely affected by the upcoming regulations on the use of the term organic.

In October of 2002, manufacturers will be expected to comply with the National Organic Standards Program (NOSP), or take the word 'organic' off their label. Under current policy guidelines set forth by USDA and the National Organic Program (NOP), manufacturers wishing to use the term organic must comply with the current standards, which can be found on the USDA's NOP website.

However, many large health and beauty aide manufacturers (HABA) have begun lobbying USDA in an effort to convince officials that personal care products cannot be made without the use of synthetic additives, or that botanical preparations or herbal essential oils cannot be extracted without the use of toxic solvents such as hexane or petrol. In a nutshell, HABA manufacturers who have incurred significant gains in the past few years through exploitation of the term organic are now funneling millions of consumer dollars into a campaign to convince USDA that body care products (organic or otherwise) cannot be made without synthetic chemicals, before the October deadline.

This attempt to lower the standards is not compelled by the science of botanical formulation, but by greed for the dollar that can be had off the terminology. Manufacturers wishing to use the term organic without freeing their products of synthetics and toxins would have us believe that true organic is simply impossible, and that body care products cannot be produced without chemical stabilizers, emulsifiers, surfactants, toxic solvents and a multitude of other inorganic compounds and "inert" ingredients. 

Corporate manufacturers are also lobbying for exemption from standard organic processing regulations that prohibit organic products to be made in the same facility as chemical products.  This would open the door to all manner of contamination; a worst-case scenario, should they succeed, would be the processing of a non-toxic insect formula, claiming to a pure botanical product being mixed and packaged in the same facility as a product containing DEET or other hazardous pesticides.

The Organic Standards that these companies are aggressively lobbying to have weakened would not only license them to falsely label their products for the sole purpose of profiting from the term, it would place many customers in serious danger, since many inert ingredients and traces of toxic substances will become undisclosed ingredients in the thousands of products that could be legally labeled organic.