Vermont Business Magazine In response to consumer concerns after published reports of fraudulent organic grain imports flooding the American market, The Cornucopia Institute, an organic industry watchdog, has released a web-basedBuyer's Guidethat identifies brands of organic dairy products, eggs, and poultry derived from animals that are exclusively fed US-grown grains.
Cornucopiahas also published a companion report,Against the Grain: Protecting Organic Shoppers against Import Fraud and Farmers from Unfair Competition, outlining over a decade of neglect by the USDA's National Organic Program (NOP). The institute said in a press release that USDA inattention has resulted in approximately half the organic corn and over 80% of the organic soybeans fed to domestic animals being imported fromChinaand former Soviet Bloc countries.
"Identifying marketplace alternatives for consumers is critical to putting an end to the profiteering perpetrated by agribusinesses that fail to verify the authenticity of organic grains used to produce their products," saidMark A. Kastel,Cornucopia'scodirector.
Cornucopia'srelease of its mobile-friendly Buyer's Guide follows its groundbreakingJune 2018white paperthat chronicles how a small number of Turkish-based multibillion-dollar agribusinesses, with production inRussia,Kazakhstan, andMoldova, came to dominate the U.S. organic grain market.
"The economic damage to U.S. organic grain producers is staggering, as they have struggled, in recent years, to compete with cheap imports that are often not even organically produced," saidAnne Ross, aCornucopiafarm policy analyst and the organization's lead researcher on import issues.
"Based on our analysis, domestic organic corn and soybean producers lost over$400 millionto dubious organic grain imports from 2015 through 2017," according toJohn Bobbe, Executive Director of the Organic Farmers' Agency for Relationship Marketing (OFARM), an umbrella organization representing organic grain marketing cooperatives in 19 states.
One organic chicken brand positively highlighted inCornucopia'sstudy is Bell and Evans, based inFredericksburg, Pennsylvania. "Although our chicken is distributed throughout the eastern half ofthe United States, we are a family-owned business, I grew up in the poultry industry, and we only feed our birds U.S. grains because we feel adamantly about the ability to stand behind the credibility of our products," saidScott Sechler, the company's founder and chairman.
The dairy section of the scorecard includes suchhighly ratedyogurt brands as Butterworks inVermontand Hawthorne Valley inNew York.
Morehere.
SOURCE:CORNUCOPIA, Wis.,Oct. 17, 2018/PRNewswire/ --The Cornucopia Institutewww.cornucopia.org