Oxymoronic as it may sound, I can imagine plans are seriously being drawn by a major cigarette company to introduce a new line of ‘organic’ cigarettes brand in order to partake in the rapidly growing ‘green’ market and capture some ‘green’ conscious smokers.
The Organic Foods Production Act which was passed in 1992, permitted the creation of the current program in the U.S. had been classified by the USDA as a marketing initiative, not a food-safety, nutrition or an agriculture program. As with any marketing effort, the program boosted the organic industry to be $23 billion in 2007 ( €16.2 billion). Currently, the big players in the industry are starting to take notice. With that in mind, they are bringing along with them all their gimmicks and schemes in order to capture one old deity as they maintain their sacrosanct missions: market share.
The effects are already being noticed. In 2008 alone, 98 percent of green-labeled goods were found guilty of greenwashing – a term coined by Jay Westerveld in an 1986 essay attacking the hotel industry’s double standard of towel re-use in promoting green while the practice also saves them heaps of money. As more and more loopholes are discovered in the laughable American organic label and more powerful actors follow the cash; lobbying to attain their desired lax standards and watching the USDA’s list of allowable non-organic ingredients grow to cover new products, consumers find themselves buying and eating the same products found in the conventional aisles.
Under the original organics law, 5 percent of a USDA-certified organic product can consist of non-organic substances, provided they are approved by the National Organic Standards Board. That list has grown from 77 to 245 substances since it was created in 2002. Companies must appeal to the board every five years to keep a substance on the list, explaining why an organic alternative has not been found.
The goal was to shrink the list over time, but only one item has been removed so far. The original law’s mandate for annual pesticide testing was also never implemented — the agency left that optional.
It is even true that pesticides were once allowed to be used by farmers on food that are to be sold as organic when the pesticides in questioned, after a ‘reasonable review’, did not contain any chemicals found in the ban list of the National Organic Program. Now it is just common knowledge for anyone in the industry that pesticide testing is hardly ever carried out.
Deputies of the NOP know and have clearly communicated that their mission is to ‘grow the industry’ as quickly as possible. Easiest, quickest and best possible way one can imagine is to incrementally relax the standard and ‘wash’ the meaning out of what organic is meant to be. Organic cigarettes may just be the beginning.
Update: Apparently there is such a thing as organic cigarettes.
Illustration: Bukutgirl
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mauriceamadeus