Urgent -- Protect Organic Food Standards

The following alert comes from the Organic Consumers Association:

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) needs your immediate help to
stop
Congress from seriously degrading organic standards. After 35 years of
hard work, the U.S. organic community has built up a multi-billion
dollar
alternative to industrial agriculture, based upon strict organic
standards
and organic community control over modification to these standards.

Now, large corporations such as Kraft, Wal-Mart, & Dean Foods--aided
and
abetted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are moving to
lower
organic standards by allowing a political appointee to create a list of
synthetic ingredients that would be allowed organic production. Even
worse, these proposed regulatory changes will reduce future public
discussion and input and take away the National Organic Standards
Board's
(NOSB) traditional lead jurisdiction in setting standards. What this
means, in blunt terms, is that USDA bureaucrats and industry lobbyists,
not consumers, will now have more control over what can go into organic
foods and products.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 20, acting in haste and near-total secrecy,
the
U.S. Senate will vote on a "rider" to the 2006 Agriculture
Appropriations
Bill that will reduce control over organic standards from the National
Standards Board and put this control in the hands of federal
bureaucrats
in the USDA.

For the past week in Washington, OCA has been urging members of the
Senate
not to reopen and subvert the federal statute that governs U.S. Organic
standards (the Organic Food Production Act - OFPA), but rather to let
the
organic community and the National Organic Standards resolve our
differences over issues like synthetics and animal feed internally, and
then proceed to a open public comment period. Unfortunately most
Senators
seem to be listening to industry lobbyists more closely than to us. We
need to raise our voices.

In the past, grassroots mobilization and mass pressure by organic
consumers have been able to stop the USDA and Congress from degrading
organic standards. This time Washington insiders tell us that the "fix
is
is already in." So we must take decisive action now. We need you to
call
your U.S. Senators today. We need you to sign the following petition
and
send it to everyone you know. We also desperately need funds to head
off
this attack in the weeks and months to come. Thank you for your
support.
Together we will take back citizen control over organic standards and
preserve organic integrity.

Take action here:
http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/oca/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1242

country.

I did think that to use the word "organic" it had to be according to the state the food was grown in.