April 17, 2014 — The hierarchy overseeing organic certification in the United States is, in a word, complex. Oversight of any and all organic production standards falls to the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP). For aquaculture, NOP relies on recommendations from the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) Livestock Committee, which officially appointed an Aquaculture Working Group (AWG) to help create a set of standards for organic aquaculture, which it dutifully did in early 2010.
But essentially nothing has happened since then, aside from delays.
The inaction is frustrating to the people who’ve worked for years on these standards, like George Lockwood, the AWG chairman. When NOSB meets in San Antonio, Texas, later this month, Lockwood says a series of critical recommendations — the use of vaccines and chlorine in culture water are particularly important for fish — must be amended if organic aquaculture is to ever become reality. Despite the fact that all these substances are used in organic terrestrial agriculture, he’s not confident of the amendments’ passage, or that the finish line is in sight.
“Without the allowance of the 10 synthetic substances for which our official Aquaculture Working Group has petitioned, there can be no organic aquaculture,” said Lockwood. “Under the present policy of the [NOP] to exclude their appointed experts on aquaculture, who are members of AWG, there is a major risk that restrictions added by NOSB members at their next meeting will be counter to workable and sensible uses of these materials.”
What Lockwood is saying is that the very people recruited for their expertise are essentially being shut out of the process, leaving NOSB members to “use their imaginations,” he said, rather than the experts they commissioned.
Worse, voices that seem to be getting the board’s attention, he added, belong to known opponents to organic aquaculture, such as Food & Water Watch, Beyond Pesticides and the National Organic Coalition. All of these groups are close to Washington, while Lockwood (California) and other AWG members are scattered about the country. From 2005 to 2010, Lockwood says his travel costs and other requirements were fully accommodated, but that’s no longer the case.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com