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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
References: