Organic Consumers Association Wants Conventional Farming Gone

Related articles

Organic Consumers Association, the notable militant trade rep group famous for creating anti-science Deniers For Hire like U.S. Right To Know and funding many others, has now laid its cards on the table, saying it wants every competitor of their clients gone.

The pro-science side always knew that but it is still odd to see it spelled out. Writing at the progressive political website Truth-Out, Martha Rosenberg, a former advertising copywriter and current freelance blogger and supporter of OCA, and Ronnie Cummins, their national director, put it in plain language; they are no longer interested in just being anti-biology or anti-fertilization, they want everyone to be organic farmers or be exterminated.

This fundamentalism is not really a surprise; a lot of the environmental groups existing today were descended from the eugenics movement and that was clearly a way to artificially select the future of humanity by aborting and sterilizing those who elites deemed unfit. This is just a cultural manifestation of it in a new form. The environmental groups created by former eugenicists enabled organic farming. The process was always around, even in the 1940s when the first good pesticide was invented, but it really only became popular after environmental groups saw the fundraising opportunity in taking a stand against biology in the 1990s.

Iron Man 64 1973

This is Iron Man #64 from 1973. It being backwards made sense because organic food was primarily for anti-science hippies in dense cities back then. While that is still true, trade reps have also successfully spun the hoary work of their clients into health halos and ethical gold. Credit: Disney

It's just rare that someone puts their contempt for the poor and those in the developing world so plainly. Because if you are not a wealthy elite, organic food is mass starvation waiting to happen, and that is why the legacy of eugenics is still evident in environmentalism and certainly organic food reps.

These PR flaks make sure they don't attack anyone giving them money; they rant about Congress, for example, but specifically exempt President Obama from their wrath, because criticizing him would be a no-no for organic shoppers and get a veto from Truth-Out. They are basically "anti's" - they make money scaring people. Yet ironically the thing they do advocate is what they truly hate. For example:


The American Council on Science and Health is an independent organization, yet the political activists they fund say we, along with everyone else in science, must be shills because we are not scaring people about food and chemicals and medicine. Who is going to pay this independent lab testing? The $100 billion organic food industry? How will that be independent? The government? It's organic lobbyists who protest efforts to have USDA take control back from the organic lobbyists who control organic food oversight. It's organic food trade groups who protest real awareness on labels, like what pesticides were used in the process of growing food.

If food safety is important, why does Organic Consumers Association say pesticides are irrelevant on a label?

Basically, OCA simply wants to get more money from its customers and they have to write this sort of thing to keep their corporate checks rolling in. The public is just a marketing tool and this is a PR stunt that would only be published on a partisan website, where they have a critical mass of anti-science beliefs among their readers. That message is not public health or food safety, it is solely about gaining a competitive advantage for their customers using legislative fiat. To accomplish that, they need to seduce more people into their belief system.

To make their case, they don't pull any punches on traditional farming, which they contend is 


This is vast conspiracy stuff, and it's ironic coming from OCA, since conspiracy is their modus operandi; good luck finding a conspiracy among scientists in agriculture, yet these anti-science groups have been tripped up repeatedly in Freedom of Information Act requests, including by the New York Times, where it was shown that they were engineering the beliefs of organic customers in order to create grassroots support for bans on regular food.

They cherry-pick their facts about nutrition as well.


Oh, natural health experts. That is also codespeak for people who don't believe in science or medicine. Deepak Chopra made the news because he did a 6-day "clinical trial" of herbal therapy and says it works, but that is hardly going to get by the FDA. It will have natural health buyers lining up, however.

They even claim that corporations are building meth labs to keep cheap immigrants docile and that organic farming would bring the American economy out of its ongoing malaise. 

It's a fantasy milieu but their target audience are people who are divorced from reality anyway. Here's hoping they stay relegated to the fringes of culture where they belong.