Georgia Rep. Nathan Deal Behind Attack on Organics

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
February 15, 2003
ANDREW MOLLISON

Washington --- The Bush administration and leading meat producers
scrambled Friday to distance themselves from a backlash against an
attempt by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) to relax organic labeling laws for
meat and poultry.

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials denied that they supported
Deal's proposition, while major food firms with organic product lines
denounced it.

Democrats in the Senate and House vowed to seek legislation that would
overturn the one-sentence clause crafted by Deal and slipped into the
3,000-page omnibus spending bill that sailed through Congress on
Thursday. President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law. Deal's
clause would let producers use the organic label on meat from livestock
that eat non-organic feed, if a USDA study begun last year shows that
organic feed costs twice as much as conventional feed.

"This is a step backward," said General Mills spokeswoman Marybeth
Thorsgaard. "We believe there needs to be a clear understanding by the
consumer of what exactly the organic label means."

At Tyson Foods, spokesman Ed Nicholson said, "We believe [the provision]
can compromise the integrity of current organic standards."

The critics are overreacting, said Deal's chief of staff, Chris Riley.
"The point is, if there is ample 100-percent organic feed available, and
it isn't too pricey, and that's reported by the Agriculture Department,
this language becomes null and void," he said.

Requests for comment were not answered by officials of Fairfield Farms
Corp., the family-owned poultry producer in Deal's district that opposed
the requirement that organic meat comes only from animals that eat
organic food.

"The language is a threat to the organic label," said spokeswoman Holly
Givens of the Organic Trade Association. "And the fact that it was done
in an underhanded way should not be allowed to stand as a precedent for
other people to try."

Republican leaders tacked Deal's provision onto the 90th page of the
agriculture section of the Senate-House compromise version of the
omnibus spending bill.

Officials representing the Department of Agriculture at that closed-door
session neither supported nor objected to the proposal, said Alisa
Harrison, spokeswoman for Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman.

"This department did not take a position on this," Harrison said.

But the department is ready to enforce the clause if, as expected, Bush
signs the bill into law, she said.

"We have to meet the will of Congress, so we will add a price component
to a study that we began last year on the availability of organic feed."

The report from that expanded study, originally expected as early as
mid-February, will become available later this year, Harrison said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) said they intend
to introduce legislation that would overturn the clause, which Leahy
charged "would gut the organic standards just recently enacted" by the
department in October after 12 years of debate.

David Carle, Leahy's press secretary, said, "The bill to repeal the
provision has been drafted and will be introduced soon."