President Obama tripled the budget and staffing at the offices of the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP), only to see American organic acreage flatline during his tenure.

The $9.1 million might seem like a rounding error for Washington D.C. But what 43 organic staffers actually did during Obama’s tenure will surprise you. Did they weed out fraud, make organic food better and encourage more domestic organic production? Sadly, no, no and no.

Organic imports from countries like China and Turkey grew steadily during Obama’s years, a trend that, not surprisingly, coincided with increased incidents of organic foodborne illnesses. Alas, Obama tripled the NOP budget and staffing, but failed to require field testing.

Roughly 40 percent of the organic food sold in America tested positive for prohibited pesticide residue during Obama’s years, in two separate studies by the USDA. Just 0.7 percent of American farmland is organic, but organic sales accounted for 4 percent of total food sales, more than five times the amount of land under organic management. This means American grocery retailers now rely on imported organic food somewhere around 80 percent of the time.

This tripling of NOP budget and staff did absolutely nothing to help American organic farmers. In fact, it hurt them.

Worse than this embarrassing organic trade imbalance is the fact that organic foods accounted for a whopping 7 percent of all food recalls in America last year, almost double what one would expect according to organic sales and 10 times what one would expect from America’s flatlining organic acreage.

Meanwhile, organic inspections and certifications all occur independently of these 43 federal organic staffers. People are often surprised to learn that the USDA does not employ any organic inspectors. Staff only keep an eye on those that do by randomly auditing files generated by USDA-accredited certifying agencies, most of which are private certification businesses. These certifiers number just 80, and employ just 160 independent organic inspectors on contract. They pay the USDA for the privilege of being audited. So, what was $9 million spent on every year? And, again, what did these 43 people do every day they went to work?

The 160 inspectors working for 80 certifying agencies. Together they account for all oversight of every American organic farm, processor, distributor and broker/trader, including the importation of certified-organic goods from abroad. They’re being overseen by 43 federal staffers? Yes. That’s the sum total of it.

Miles McEvoy, Obama’s man in charge of America’s organic program, claims the increases were necessary to ensure the integrity of the USDA-certified organic label. But with organic food recalls and imports both going up, and the number of American organic farmers and acreage flatlining, it would appear McEvoy was totally, completely and undeniably wrong. Yet, he remains in command at the NOP.

Only organic end-products are tested under McEvoy, and just 5 percent of the time at that, and only for pesticides, not for pathogens from manure, thus accounting for the organic industry’s shamefully high record of foodborne illness outbreaks. Costs of this pesticide testing are, again, covered entirely by the private sector. Many farmers make use of manure, but usually not on crops for human consumption. Only in the organic industry is manure routinely applied to fields used to grow food for humans, a practice which can be detrimental to human health, sometimes permanently, when manure is not fully composted.

And yet, the only across-the-board organic testing in America’s multibillion dollar organic industry is for GMOs, even though no one anywhere in the world, not human or animal, has ever fallen ill from consuming GMO foods. Costs, again, are borne entirely by — you guessed it — the private sector.

So where did all that money go if not to field testing? Perhaps to fund the hundreds of anti-modern-farming NGOs that run a constant barrage of anti-GMO, anti-pesticide, anti-fertilizer, anti-animal-confinement campaigns? On that question, there are two more troubling points to make.

First, many of the 80 certifying agencies that grant USDA organic certification to farmers, processors, etc., receive anywhere between 1.5 percent to 3 percent of gross revenue from their clients. This “royalty” from an industry worth roughly $46 billion a year — more than Major League Baseball — has proven highly lucrative just for doing paperwork. And people from these agencies, and sometimes the agencies themselves, can be found at the forefront of anti-modern-farming campaigns throughout all 50 states. Certifiers only collect royalties on shipments they approve, while being left to decide whose products they’re going to test for pesticides, just 5 percent of the time. No wonder so much organic food is being imported, with an astonishing 40 percent of it testing positive for prohibited pesticides, and with so many cases of organic foodborne illness.

Second, it turns out $9.1 million per-annum to run the office is just the tip of this organic iceberg. Another quarter of a billion — $256 million to be exact — was spent by the Obama Administration on subsidies to the American organic industry.

So, if American organic farm acreage flatlined over the past eight years while organic food recalls went up, along with imports, in a nation that has exported food throughout its history with one of the world’s top food safety records, what do we call this? This profligate spending not only failed to deliver, but delivered precisely the opposite of what anyone who works for a living expects from Washington.

Make no mistake. This was not simply a case of yet another program gone awry in the nation’s capital. The price tag for America’s new F-35 fighter is, unfortunately, a typical example of such incompetence and waste. But if the F-35 flew backwards instead of forwards, and Obama knew about it for the past eight years and funded it anyway, that’d be fraud. Fraud against American organic farmers, American consumers of organic food, and taxpayers.

Let’s hope the next administration fully reverses this trend.

Editor’s note on the authors: Mischa Popoff is a policy advisor at The Heartland Institute, and is the author of Is it Organic? The inside story of the organic industry. Jay Lehr is the Science Director at the Heartland Institute and is the author of more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 30 books.

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When all else fails, revolutionaries, being revolutionaries, turn to violence. A new “Monsanto Collaborators” website created by millionaire organic activist Mike “the Health Ranger” Adams charges that hundreds of thousands of deaths have been caused by GMO crops, and that people who support genetically modified organisms, like myself, Fox News’s John Stossel and the former ABC Newsman Jon Entine, are guilty of mass genocide, and hence deserving of a punishment that befits our crime.

“Every 30 minutes, a farmer commits suicide due to GMO crop failures,” Adams claims, blissfully unaware, apparently, that stories of mass suicide by farmers in India, perpetuated by another millionaire organic activist, Vandana Shiva, have been thoroughly debunked.

The suicide rate among Indian farmers began to increase years before GMO crops were introduced, and the rate of farmer suicides has remained constant since GMOs were introduced, even as adoption of GMO crops across the Indian subcontinent has steadily increased. Pesticide usage has decreased 40 percent, while yields and profits have increased.

Adams had called for precisely such a list, asking “How do you even decide on a punishment that can fit the scale and magnitude of such a collection of crimes?” He stresses that he in no way condones “vigilante violence against anyone,” but in the same breath says, “I believe every condemned criminal deserves a fair trial and a punishment that fits the crime. Do not misinterpret this article as any sort of call for violence, as I wholly disavow any such actions. I am a person who demands due process under the law for all those accused of crimes.” (Emphasis added.)

Hardly reassuring, now is it?

Adams needs to brush up on his common law. If I and my fellow pro-GMOers are “condemned criminals,” why do we need “a fair trial”? (Hint: we don’t, at least not if we’re “condemned,” which means we’ve already had a trial, fair or otherwise.) Are we, in fact, “condemned”? Or just “accused”? Adams’s hollow words amount to little more than the classic political apology: “I’m sorry if you were offended by what I said.”

Meanwhile, I have never had anything to do with Monsanto. It’s the science behind GMOs that drives my work, not the profit margins of any corporation. A lot of good people work for GMO companies like Monsanto. But the executives have grown somewhat complacent, frankly, intent it seems only on making money off the GMOs they’ve already got on the market. By failing to stand up to anti-GMO organic activists such as Adams and Shiva over the past decade, these executives have ensured that we’re stuck with the same handful of GMO crops that were available 11 years ago when I hung up my organic inspector’s hat. Can you say “stagnation”?

Organic agriculture began in response to the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer after ammonium nitrate was first pulled — in literally infinite quantities — from the Earth’s atmosphere in 1917. The brilliant German Jew, Fritz Haber, had finally cracked the code that had eluded humankind for centuries. Early proponents of organic farming claimed this disconnected us from Mother Earth, and so it was that opposition to synthetic nitrogen became the basis for organic farming.

In the 1960s, Rachel Carson’s bestseller Silent Spring pushed the organic movement to also reject synthetic pesticides. Then when genetic engineering finally came of age in the early 1990s, organic activists wasted no time in opposing it as well, without even waiting to see how this technology might alleviate issues caused by the use of ammonium nitrate and synthetic pesticides. Again, talk about stagnation.

See the pattern? The organic movement has consistently rejected technology. To their credit, early organic scientists knew they had to innovate the alternative to synthetic ammonium nitrate: natural composting. And they did. The scientific, test-based, peer-reviewed works of luminaries Sir Albert Howard and Lady Eve Balfour are still used to this day by honest organic farmers.

But rejecting pesticides was a bit more problematic. Natural pesticides and other strategies were adopted, but this was when the organic movement became essentially negative. Then, when GMO crops were rejected, the once-proud organic movement finally came to define itself exclusively in terms of what it was not rather than in terms of any provably positive values it might possess.

And so it is that organic activists now find themselves pretending that GMOs kill farmers, while ignoring the benefits GMOs have provided to India, which has gone from Third-World status to an agricultural export nation in less than a generation, thanks to the adoption of every single innovative technology that Adams and Shiva summarily reject.

Lighting our homes likewise went through many stages of innovation. From open fire pits to the torch, the candle, the lantern, and finally the gas light, technologies in succession have undergone centuries of fine-tuning before being replaced.

Then along came the light bulb. Not only was it a quantum leap forward in terms of efficiency, convenience, and safety, but after every other technology had hit its “glass ceiling,” the light bulb also offered us a way forward: in fact, the only way forward.

The light bulb, just like the science of genetic engineering, represents not merely an innovation that we can fine-tune and perfect. It is well and truly the only innovation worth innovating further.

Sure, someone could come up with a new version of the coal-oil lamp. But it will never touch the efficiency of even the most primitive electric light bulb. Likewise, we’ll continue to see improvements in traditional forms of plant breeding and organic farming techniques. But only the science of genetic engineering offers the means to viably advance food production beyond our wildest expectations.

How wild exactly?

It used to take six hours for the average worker to earn enough to buy a candle that would burn for one hour. Today you can buy an hour’s worth of electric lighting in a half second.

Which do you prefer?

Farmers, both in India and right here in America, have overwhelmingly made their up minds and have adopted GMO crops. Shouldn’t we take a cue from them and ignore activists who don’t run their own farms? If a farmer lies about the efficacy of a new form of technology, he goes broke. If Adams and Shiva lie about new forms of agricultural technology, they rake in $40,000 per engagement on the lecture circuit.

Whom are you going to believe?

— Christine Bushway, Executive Director of the Organic Trade Association  Naturally Savvy, August 2012

How safe are organic foods, especially when compared to conventionally grown varieties? Not as safe as many assume. Three weeks ago, a recall was announced for certified-organic berries sold at Costco. According to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 118 people in 8 states have now contracted hepatitis A infection linked to Townsend Farms frozen berries bought at the box store retailer. Hepatitis A infection is a debilitating condition that can last for weeks or months, and even be deadly. The specific item in the crosshairs—Organic Antioxidant Blend Frozen Berry and Pomegranate Mix—was apparently purchased in April. The CDC says Costco removed the item from its shelves and Townsend Farms voluntarily recalled the item. But what about those who certify organic food? What’s their response? Rather than test organic crops in the field for lethal pathogens resulting from improperly composted manure, authorities in the United States and Canada say they will continue to rely on paperwork to prove the safety of these niche products. And organic activists, like Christine Bushway, quoted at the top of this article, are perfectly fine with this, not stopping to consider that it’s actually untested certified-organic foods, and not thoroughly tested genetically-modified (GM) varieties, that pose an everyday potential threat to the public.  Should you worry? You heard right. Certified organic crops are not tested. They’re not tested to ensure that prohibited substances like synthetic pesticides are avoided; nor to ensure that feces are kept out of the organic food chain. The system is based on good-faith compliance (record-keeping and record-checking) and a hope that nothing untoward happens. And it’s this complete lack of scientific rigor which has led to the current Townsend fiasco. Did you assume, like most people do, that the term “certified” meant organic crops were being tested? After all, that is what that term means when light bulbs are certified to be 100 Watts or motor oil is certified to be 10W30. But that’s not what it means in the organic industry. In response to this current scandal, supporters of the status quo in the American organic industry are attempting to put as much distance as they can between organic certification and food safety, as if to imply that these are two totally separate considerations. “We don’t see that organic standards necessarily overlap with food safety standards,” said organic program manager Brenda Book with the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA). “One thing organic-certification should not be confused with… is a food safety standard.” Book sits in a chair that was once occupied by none other than Miles V. McEvoy, the current Deputy Administrator of the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP). Back when he held Book’s position with the WSDA, McEvoy was, to his credit, one of the few people in America doing any organic field testing (1). And he brought this commitment to science with him when he moved to the USDA in Washington DC in 2008. He decided to try something unprecedented at the national level: to begin unannounced field testing to ensure prohibited substances and excluded methods were not being used on organic farms, as per USDA NOP §205.670. It was something the Consumers Union (the policy division of Consumer Reports) had called for more than a decade earlier (2). Sadly, as with many good ideas brought to Capitol Hill, it took an inordinately long time for McEvoy to get others to act on his promise. The final program was eventually watered down to include only a small fraction (5 percent) of the more than $33-billion-worth of organic crops the USDA certifies every year, with little and likely no testing of foreign organic crops, like the ones implicated in the current hepatitis A outbreak scandal and which provide the majority of the organic food the USDA certifies for sale in America every year.  And yet, in response to this organic hepatitis outbreak, apologists like Book still maintain that “organic certifiers are concerned with the prohibited materials side of contamination over the microbial variety,” as if to imply that McEvoy’s efforts to make organic certification more scientific apply only if someone cheats by using prohibited pesticides. Certainly consumers expect the USDA to clamp down on prohibited use of pesticides when they pay hefty premiums for organic food. But shouldn’t they also expect their organic food to be scientifically verified to be fecal-pathogen free?  The irony is palpable. Organic activists, registered with the Internal Revenue Service as non-governmental organizations or foundations, spend millions of tax-free dollars on anti-GM propaganda and ballot initiatives for questionable labeling laws even though  “over 25 years of research has failed to find any harm from GM technology.” Even the United Nations World Health Organization has declare that GM crops and food are perfectly safe. And yet, these very same anti-GM organic activists fail to see the immediate and very real threat right before them posed by untested “organic” food, which could be contaminated with natural bacteria. They want all GM crops to be tested according to a misinterpretation of the “precautionary principle,” but are not willing to test organic crops. The buck stops here The issue boils down to whether or not pathogenic microbes – which can give rise to diseases like hepatitis, E. coli and listeriosis (to name but a few) – qualify as prohibited materials in organic production. People like Book seem to be determining that this is not their responsibility. Let’s look at the section of the USDA NOP where proper manure management is outlined. Section §205.203 is where we’ll find the USDA’s “Soil fertility and crop nutrient management practice standard.” Subsection (c) stipulates that “The producer must manage plant and animal materials…in a manner that does not contribute to contamination of crops [or] soil.” Subsection (c) (1) says manure must be composted (emphasis added). And finally there are subsections (c) (2) (ii) and (iii), where proper composting protocols (temperature and duration) are outlined in detail. Clearly, any failure to comply with §205.203 means an excluded method is being used, which could quite easily result in a prohibited substance – i.e. feces – making its way into the organic food chain. Pretty straightforward. Right? But not according to most in charge of this multibillion dollar business. Why does the failure to keep such prohibited materials as raw manure out of an organic crop through improper composting not qualify as an excluded method in organic production? As a former organic farmer and USDA contract inspector, I believe that USDA organic certification is, and always has been, a food safety standard. It’s just that no one has ever enforced §205.203 through unannounced inspections and field testing as the USDA NOP requires. Not surprising given that everyone involved in the organic industry has been busy attacking GM crops, along with all other forms of science-based advancement in agriculture, instead of working to improve upon how organic food is kept genuine and safe.The powers-that-be in the organic industry have had the proverbial blinders on for the last twenty odd years, never missing an opportunity to scare consumers with unproven theories about the dangers of modern agriculture, all the while failing to recognize organic’s shortcomings. Anyone can see that testing is in order here, and that any food that fails that test should not be certified as organic. I’ve been saying this since I became an organic inspector in 1998, and I have a standing offer to debate this issue anywhere, any time with anyone from the organic industry. But, sadly, those opposed to across-the-board organic field testing have chosen instead to continue the full-frontal assault against science and technology, and to malign anyone who believes organics should be modernized. Organic activists believe it’s perfectly acceptable to make use of the very latest in science and technology when it comes to all other aspects of their lives, whether it’s communications (smart phones and the internet), transportation (hybrid automobiles and high-speed trains), or energy production (solar panels and wind mills). But food production is the exception for some strange reason, and they actually believe farming needs to go backwards in order to move forwards. And the result, tragically, is outbreaks like this one.  Is the worst behind us on this outbreak? A remarkably similar case occurred in Germany three years ago when 44 people died and over 3,700 fell ill after eating E. coli-contaminated certified-organic bean sprouts. Hundreds of the survivors will require kidney dialysis for the rest of their lives. The source of that contamination was never definitively determined, although a nearby cattle operation was suspected of contaminating the water used to sprout the organic beans. This raises the question: What measures were being taken to ensure the water used in this organic sprouting operation was safe? Was there any testing? Food scares can often drag on for weeks, even months, and are rarely solved satisfactorily. All consumers can hope for is that authorities learn from such disasters so that they might be prevented in the future. As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  The incubation period for hepatitis A is between two and six weeks, and the berries were a frozen product, meaning some people may still have them in their freezers. This means this outbreak caused by certified-organic berries is likely to continue for some time. Many more cases could very well result, and lawsuits are already being filed. And yet, authorities remain silent on the most obvious preventive solution: start testing organic crops for fecal contamination.  Even the lawyers representing the victims in this still-unfolding tragedy appear oblivious to the broader implications and obvious possible solution: organic field testing. Instead they are electing to sue small companies like Townsend Farms in Oregon which sourced some of the ingredients for its frozen berry mix in good faith from Turkey, and supplied the finished product to Costco, all under the supposedly watchful eye of the USDA NOP. We can assume that all the paperwork was in order throughout these transactions or none of the ingredients in this organic berry mix would even have made it to market. The problem is that the USDA didn’t bother doing any field testing. Until pressure is brought to bear on the USDA NOP for failing to uphold its own rules on preventing the contamination of organic crops with pathogens, this problem will occur again, and again, and again.  Feeling better yet? Keep in mind that for all its bluster, the organic industry in America still comprises just roughly 1 percent of total food consumption. What will happen when it reaches 2 or 4 percent? Shouldn’t the USDA be held to account and be forced to get things sorted out scientifically right now before total organic sales in America grow any further? Defenders of the certified-organic status quo categorically reject the idea of routinely testing organic crops in the field, claiming it will make organic food too expensive. Ironically, when conventional growers make the same argument to explain one reason why they oppose mandatory labeling for GM foods, organic advocates are first in line to ridicule them for putting industry profits ahead of food safety. The difference is that there are no proven safety issues involving GM foods, but quite serious ones, as this incident shows, involving organic foods. And yet, in spite of the preponderance of evidence as to which of these two competing agriculture philosophies needs more scrutiny, the USDA is planning to test only a mere 5 percent of the domestic organic crops it certifies every year, completely ignoring the lion’s share of the organic crops they certify on paper every year in far-off foreign lands like Turkey, along with China, Mexico and Brazil. Even within the context of the organic industry itself, the cost argument looks bogus under close examination. The cost of the current paper-based organic certification system is at least $1,000-a-year per farm. A full-spectrum herbicide residue analysis meanwhile costs about $100, and the cost of a “Total Fecal Coliform” test is just $20. It would appear, even to the casual observer, that the real reason organic leaders resist across-the-board organic field testing is because it will undermine the persuasiveness of their leading marketing ploy: to deride GM foods and other forms of advanced agricultural technology which are constantly being tested and have consistently proven to be completely safe. As long as activists can stave off the commonsense requirement of testing organic crops, they can continue to freely ride a wave of ignorance in the marketplace, capitalizing on the average consumer’s assumption that anything natural must be better, even in cases where it can be lethal. In fact, if the organic industry in its current state was held to the same rigorous scientific standards that the rest of the agricultural sector is held to, consumers might very well come to realize the proven connection between quality of life and the very technologies that organic activists reject, like GM crops, antibiotics, and pesticides. And then, well… they’d have to find something else to gripe about.