Lawsuit Alleges that the USDA has Turned a Blind Eye to Illegal Grower Group Certifications, Which Have Greatly Harmed American Farmers and Consumers

All organic farms are not being inspected annually — a requirement of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 — and the USDA has failed the entire industry yet again.

This is alleged in a bombshell new lawsuit against the USDA, which also asserts “that the agency has turned a blind eye to illegal, ‘shadow’ organic certification bodies for many, many years.” If true, this will have caused irreparable harm to the USDA organic seal and untold financial damage to legitimate U.S.-based organic farmers, not to mention the extraordinary amount of fraudulent organic products that may have ended up in the shopping baskets of unsuspecting consumers.

At issue is something called “grower groups,” a term that is mentioned or referred to nowhere in the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFPA).

Prior to OFPA being ratified by Congress and enacted into the marketplace in 2002, grower groups were a way for extremely small producers (coffee, chocolate, tea and other specialty crops) in developing countries to be constituted into one group, or cooperative, and with one representative, possibly an elder in the community, overseeing everything. This mechanism would give them access to the valuable U.S. market without being hamstrung by overly burdensome and costly regulations.