Canadian beef has been put through the food-safety mincer of late, but other links in the country’s food chain also need closer inspection.
Organic farming would be a good start.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is vowing to tighten slaughterhouse regulations in the wake of the huge XL Foods beef recall. But who is field-testing products in Canada’s $2 billion per year organic food sector?
No one, apparently.
So says former organic food inspector Mischa Popoff.
According to Popoff, the system of certifying organic farms in B.C. and elsewhere across the country is, shall we say, integrity-challenged.
Not one to mince words, Popoff describes it more bluntly: “fraud” – a paper chase rather than a designation earned by passing ground-level testing.
If that’s the case, the global brand for B.C. quality (see “Asian market hungry for high-end food and drink” – BIV issue 1196; September 25-October 1) is in for a severe caning on the global stage. Popoff’s beef here, according to his “Canada’s Organic Nightmare” report, is pretty basic: “Organic crops and livestock are not tested in Canada before they are certified, thus making organic certification essentially meaningless.”
For anyone who cares about what he or she eats or drinks, that’s unsettling. Especially considering that people pay a premium for organic products because they’re confident in the food inspection system’s ability to ensure those products are toxin-free. But paying that premium might not guarantee anything, aside from a higher grocery bill.
“Would you pay for anything that was never tested?” Popoff asks. “Would you pay a speeding ticket issued to you by a policeman who didn’t use a radar gun but thought you were going ‘pretty fast?’”
Popoff points out that while the CFIA took over regulation of the organic food sector in 2009, it wasn’t until late last year that it conducted field tests on organic crops. Worse still, the results of the test from the publically funded organization conducted on approximately 600 samples were not released to the public. The results came courtesy of a freedom of information request filed by the CBC.
Popoff’s report, which was co-written with Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder turned author and pragmatic businessman, points out that 24% of the samples from the tests contained residues of prohibited herbicides and pesticides.
Popoff added that Canada’s organic farming regulations contain no thresholds for pesticide or herbicide residue distinct from non-organic farming.
While Michel Saumur, national manager for the CFIA’s Canada Organic Office, says field-testing could be used to ensure that a farmer is adhering to organic principles or to verify suspicions that those principles are being violated, he concedes that under current regulations “it’s not an activity that must be done.”
As to how many field tests have been done since the CFIA took over regulation of the organic food sector: “We don’t have that number.” (Read: not many.)
Farms are certified organic after their owners submit an organic plan and undergo a site inspection by CFIA-certified inspectors. For Popoff the lack of any spot-checking of organic farms before or after certification seriously undermines the integrity of the system and opens the door to cheaters.
Canada, he said, has a stellar reputation as a food exporter, “except on organics; our standards are so lacking compared with the American, or European or Japanese standards; it’s just a joke.”
At stake in all of this is Canada’s reputation as a land of high quality food standards.
If, after eight years of crafting our standards for organic food, we have come up with a framework that includes no requirement to ensure that food certified thus is free of pesticides and herbicides and no specified threshold for those chemicals in organic foods, we have arrived at another Canadian compromise that will damage the country’s brand worldwide.
More importantly, it will hurt the organic food movement and its efforts to clean up the food chain and build a more sustainable world. •
