The Year in Review - FROM THE GROUND UP

We work hard here at the Wedge Newsletter to keep co-op members up to date on the politics swirling around food and agriculture. To that end, here's a year-end sampler of issues facing the farmers and producers who work hard to keep your pantries filled.

The Wedge Newsletter first reported on this issue late last spring, after the Environmental Working Group released a study that found high traces of perchlorate in a small sample of lettuce grown in the Imperial Valley of California.

Perhaps even scarier, the August 8 issue of The Pinnacle News reported that 419 water wells in the Sacramento area tested positive for perchlorate contamination. Twenty-two states nationwide have now found evidence of perchlorate contamination.

A component in rocket fuel used by the defense, aerospace, and explosives industries, perchlorate, has been linked to thyroid disorders and alterations in infant brain development, and yet, it's a surprisingly untested chemical. Neither the FDA, the EPA, nor the USDA has determined a safe level of perchlorate exposure.

Because the Imperial Valley is Minnesota's biggest lettuce supplier in winter, the Wedge Newsletter contacted Senator Mark Dayton's office to ask if he had any inside information regarding this issue for our pages. A staff member, Jeremy Bratt, called us to explain where the investigation into perchlorate contamination stands at the federal level.

Several state and federal agencies are currently studying perchlorate, according to Mr. Bratt. The Food and Drug Administration is looking at perchlorate in produce and bottled water; the federal and California State Environmental Protection Agencies are looking at perchlorate in drinking water; and the National Academy of Science and FDA are jointly studying what a dangerous level of daily intake might be. The Department of Defense is investigating the costs of clean-up.

This is a hive of activity to be sure. But much of this governmental activity, from our vantage point as the full-time winter consumers of Imperial Valley lettuce, appears to be an attempt to keep a conclusion on perchlorate's toxicity from being determined any time soon.

According to Peter Waldman of The Wall Street Journal, the White House intervened in March 2003 "to delay further regulatory action on perchlorate, by referring the health debate to the National Academy of Sciences for review." This allowed the Bush administration to order the EPA "not to speak about perchlorate" while the investigation was underway.

But even without a gag order from the White House, determining perchlorate's toxicity won't be easy, since the federal EPA, the California EPA, and the Defense Department all disagree on what safe levels of perchlorate in drinking water might be. California believes one part per billion is safe. The federal EPA has said in the past that 2 to 6 ppb might be safe. Colonel Daniel Rogers, the Pentagon's chief of environmental law and litigation, however, is comfortable with two hundred parts per billion and believes that the California EPA is "erring on the side of caution" (August, Pinnacle News).

According to the September Environmental Law Advisory, a position paper released by law firm Goodwin and Procter, this arguing between agencies "will likely push back the date of any final action on a perchlorate acceptable daily intake for another two years."

What's more, citing "national security issues," the Bush administration continues to demand that private defense contractors be held blameless for perchlorate contamination. So even if all parties agree on how much perchlorate is dangerous in the human system, the polluters may not be held responsible.

We'll have more on this issue as it crumbles before our eyes.

On October 22, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal judge's ruling that the mandatory pork check-off system is unconstitutional and should be scrapped.

This is a huge victory for small, independent hog farms.

The pork check off system was put in place back in 1988, when it was decided that the money it collected could be used to promote the marketing and lobbying efforts of the National Pork Producers Council. This system was disagreeable to many small hog farmers, who didn't belong to the Council and who found themselves getting economically stomped by the large corporate farms who did belong. The check off, after all, raised about $40 to $50 million per year for a Council that promoted the welfare of Cargill and ADM owned hog farms.

The Sixth Circuit Court's decision, Susan Stoke of Farmers' Legal Action Group told The New Farm, "is a vindication of the rights of independent hog farmers who have been fighting this illegitimate and unconstitutional check off for more than five years."

The fight Stoke is talking about began in 1998, when the USDA conducted a national referendum on the check off system, and American hog farmers voted 53% to 47% to end it. Clinton ordered the termination of the mandatory check off system just before leaving office.

But as soon as President Bush took office, his administration chose to ignore the majority decision, and current Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman threw out the vote, again requiring all hog farmers to pay the fee to the National Pork Producers' Council whether they belonged or not. A U.S. district court upheld the 1998 vote in a decision last March, when Judge Richard Enslen concluded that the pork check off was "unconstitutional and rotten." Secretary Veneman appealed, claiming that the result of that 1998 vote was a violation of the government's First Amendment rights (we haven't the space here to parse her bizarre logic).

The October ruling from Sixth Circuit court upholds Judge Enslen's assessment of this program's rottenness.

The Wedge Newsletter committed quite a bit of space to the birth of the USDA Organic Rule over the course of the last year. The Rule's most obvious effect for this co-op, of course, was the provision allowing grocery retailers to be certified organic, right along with juice producers, rice growers, squash farmers, and beef producers. Now, every department in the Wedge, except the Deli, has been certified organic.

But in the broader scope of the organic movement, a fundamental and alarming shift occurred when the organics went "legit" with the USDA Organic Rule: The definition of "organic" suddenly opened itself up to the democratic process.

And federal democracy, as the organic movement soon learned, is not a hallowed hall of nice intentions. It's a bare-knuckled, pork-grabbing smack-down.

Case in point, in a classic back room deal, a rider was attached to the Omnibus 2003 Appropriations Bill last spring that would allow conventional chicken feed to be fed to organic chickens. The attempted provision was little more than a sop to one conventional chicken farm in one Georgia congressman's district, but had it been put into law, it would have opened the door on completely redefining organic standards. As widely reported, the rider was struck down after a groundswell of negative farmer and consumer reaction.

The USDA's National Organic Program must also guard against watering down organic health and body care products - literally - since up for debate at the NOP is whether "organic water" should be allowed in these products. This water, which is actually a tea, a byproduct of organic production, is being pushed by some producers as a legitimate organic ingredient. The National Organic Standards, however, require that water not be measured as part of a product's organic ingredients list, which would seemingly answer this point.

The Organic Consumers Association started a campaign to keep organic standards stringent in the health and body care industry. Many of you signed the petition at the Wedge HBC desk, and the OCA recently wrote to ask us to continue collecting signatures in support of their campaign. So stop by and show your support for a firm definition of the word "organic."

The Wedge Newsletter will always do its part to keep you up to date on these issues. But for more timely updates, you can always check out www.ewg.org and www.organ