Last week, I was pretty discouraged when reading that the National Organic Program administration had made changes to the intent of National Organic Standards. There were a lot of problems with this - they did it without consulting the board or the public, and the changes really messed with the intent of organic -- saying that there were certain situations when you could administer antibiotics and still consider a dairy cow to be organic, certain situations where certain pesticides were okay as long as you made a "good faith effort" to figure out whether the pesticide was a bad one, etc., etc.
It was a mess. It was basically flushing the "USDA Certified Organic" idea down the drain. While I didn't write about this on my blog, Jason has been having to hear me rail against it for about five straight days.
Well ... something very cool happened yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman rescinded the changes, and said that from now on, the National Organic Program has to run changes by the board and the public before any policy is set. Yee haw! It's very encouraging that someone in Washington heard the outcry and made a change due to that.
Read all about it in the Chronicle: " 'Organic' outcry heeded Feds withdraw changes allowing more pesticides"
