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Re: organic standards



In New York organic certification is supplied by an NGO, NOFA (Northeast 
Organic Farmers Association). The standards are set by a panel of 
members, and compliance is established through bookkeeping. You must farm 
organically for 5 years and not be close enough to a non-organic farm for 
pesticide drift. Setting up the standard for organic meat easily took 
more than 5 years. You pay a fee for the costs of being certified. If you 
don't or can't pay the fee, you can always advertise as "un-certified 
organic." This is considered sufficient caveat to the consumer that they 
are just taking you at your word. It sound like California is trying to 
squeeze out small scale or occasional farmers.

When New York began certifing midwives through the Board of Education the 
lay midwives supported it, thinking they would finally get certification. 
Instead they are being prosecuted. All the certification is going to 
nurse midwives, a group with a much wealthier lobby and alliances with 
doctors and hospitals, even though the statistics indicate they do not 
provide safer births. If anything, they indicate the opposite. This is 
effectively eliminating home birth, and making birth an infinately more 
expensive proposition. Caveat he who looks to the state for legitimacy!
-- 
Karen Stark
ks36@cornell.edu


"In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the 
good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the 
bad. All that official discipline, about which the Socialists themselves 
were in doubt or at least on the defensive, was taken over bodily by the 
Capitalists. They have now added all the bureacratic tyrannies of a 
social state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a Capitalist state. For 
the vital point is that it did no in the smallest degree diminish the 
inequalities of a Capitalist State. It simply destroyed such individual 
liberties as remained among its victims."

G.K. Chesterton

 The habit of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
 that have not got it.

        --G. B. Shaw





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