Cracking down on fraud in feed
Out tenth most read story last month was one about Beyond Pesticides, a US not for profit group, launching an investigative arm to track fraudulently labeled feed grains, products and foods.
Its investigative unit, OrganicEye, will address what Beyond Pesticides considers the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) “systemic failure” to safeguard players in the US organic industry.
The agency provides a resource for members of the US organic farming community and their customers, said Mark Kastel, director and co-founder with OrganicEye, who has also acted as an independent fraud investigator within the organic production system and marketplace.
“We’re not private eyes, we’re public eyes – we’re operating as investigators, as a public interest group. So whenever fraud occurs, or the USDA misinterprets the spirit and letter of the law to favor industrial agriculture, it places ethical industry participants at a competitive disadvantage, and we won’t stand for that.”
"We hope to inform organic stakeholders – the people who own this industry – what’s really going on and hold the commercial players, the government and the certifiers who aren’t doing their job accountable,” he told us.