Pursuant to yesterday's teleconference I am sending some material that I promised to E-mail to all committee members. I thought the attached might be helpful in an introductory way regarding the Precautionary Principle, which I believe is critical to our efforts to respond to the organic rule.

It seems to me that a fundamental problem we (and maybe the NOP) are having is that we are faced with a regulatory system that essentially allows anything to be used in ecosystems unless they are proven unsafe by "scientific" data. And scientific data, under this scheme, means observable cause-effect relationships. This is the risk management scheme that has been adopted by federal agencies, and I fear it is the one we have been saddled with in the organic rule. That is why "measurable degradation" appears so many times in the rule as the criteria by which we have to make our case if we want to say no to a material that we don't want used in the organic system.

I have suspected that these were the operating principles ever since I first read the rule, but it became crystal clear yesterday when we were told by the NOP staff that one of the ways we could document "degradation" in soil quality was measurable damage to earth worms. As I said on the phone, every soil scientist working with earth worms and soil quality with whom I have conferred has told me that it sometimes takes years to establish cause effect relationships between farming practices and earth worm populations. So that means that under this regulatory scheme (i.e. risk assessment) we might have to allow ecologically damaging practices for years before we can document degradation.

This is especially true with respect to soil, since soil scientists are still debating how to measure soil quality, and since soil microbe communities are only now beginning to be understood. New gene typing technologies are now, for the first time, allowing us to identify soil microbe species. It will be years before we will be able to determine which microbes cause which effects in soil and plant systems. And then some years more before we learn how to manage soil to take advantage of this miniature world of ecosystem services---critical to our understanding of organic agriculture.

We will have these same problems with respect to evaluating the safety of pesticides, synergists, GEOs, etc. etc. To some extent we will have the same problem with respect to processing aids. Since we are talking about maintaining (and hopefully enhancing) ECOLOGICAL systems, our task in proving degradation is even more difficult than it is for industrial systems, who only need to prove toxicological degradation. As Jane Rissler and Margaret Mellon have pointed out in their work on THE ECOLOGICAL RISKS OF ENGINEERED CROPS (1996) assessing ecological risks can be tremendously complicated and time consuming. In my judgment there is no way that the NOSB has the resources to assess such degradation with any kind of assurance.

So, I believe we will have to insist that USDA allow us to establish a regulatory system based on the ancient wisdom that has guided organic all along---namely, that we do not posses the cleverness to understand the intricate interrelationships of nature's biological and evolutionary systems, so we have no choice but to act with caution. That is why we have always said "no" to materials, unless they were absolutely necessary, and the material had to be proven safe, rather than merely not proven unsafe, before it was allowed. This is the old "better to be safe than sorry" principle which has guided us for decades, and is the notion that lies at the heart of the Precuationary principle.

As I mentioned on the phone, an international conference on the precautionary principle was held in Racine, Wisconsin a few weeks ago and numerous papers were presented. I am attaching one entitled "Precautionary Science" that I think may be particularly relevant to our discussion on this. I was privileged to present a paper on agriculture and the precautionary principle that I will be happy to share with anyone interested. Just let me know that you'd like a copy and I will send it on its way.

Also attached is a "Dear Colleague" letter sent to participants at the conference from Carolyn Raffensperger which gathers up some of the ideas generated by the conference, and also a copy of the ":Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle" that was unanimously adopted by all of the participants at the conference. Finally, as promised, I am attaching a copy of the "Proposed Principles" that Chuck Benbrook and I developed in the hope that it would start some dialogue concerning the "basis" for evaluating the rule.

If any of you are interested in the Precautionary Principle in greater depth, I can suggest other sources of information. My sense is that this is a concept whose time has come and we will be hearing a great deal more about it in the months ahead. In fact several countries, and a few US states are either crafting statutory language, or have already adopted statutes, enshrining this principle into law.

Incidentally, an excellent biological/philosophical statement of how we should be approaching our evaluation of technology in organic systems (especially genetic engineering) is Craig Holdrege's GENETICS AND THE MANIPULATION OF LIFE; THE FORGOTTEN FACTOR OF CONTEXT (1997) Wes Jackson has referred to this as "possibly the most important book of our time". I agree, and it is very useful for getting back to the roots of why we all started farming organically in the first place.

So I don't know how we convince the regulatory bureaucracy to allow us to use the ecological, precautionary approach, rather than the toxicological, risk assessment approach. Maybe we just have to say, as a NOSB, that this is the way we are going to do it, and if USDA can't function by those rules we will simply have to take our industry back.

If any of you think this information will be useful to the rest of the NOSB or other constituencies, please feel free to distribute.

Thanks for a good conversation yesterday. It was the first time I have seen some light at the end of the tunnel since this difficult process began.

Cordially,

Fred Kirschenmann

Crops Committee
Steve Pavich sppavich12@aol.com
Marvin Hollen wtp@RMCI.NET
Joan Gussow jeg30@columbia.edu
Lyn Coody lynn coody@compuserve.com
Bill Welsh wfof@ptel.net
Betsy Leydon corevaluesne@mothers.org
Eric Sideman esiceman@biddeford.com
Fred Kirschenmann farmvo@daktel.com