Cornucopia Institute Issues Report on Organic Grain Fraud

The Cornucopia Institute has released “The Turkish Infiltration of the U.S. Organic Grain Market: How Failed Enforcement and Ineffective Regulations Made the U.S. Ripe for Fraud and Organized Crime,” a report arguing that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has failed to “curb the infiltration of questionable organic grain imports” into the U.S. food supply. The report alleges that shipments of grain have arrived from Turkey, Russia, Moldova and Kazakhstan that were purportedly sourced from countries that do not have sufficient organic acreage to produce the amount of imported organic grains.

The report accompanies a Cornucopia letter urging Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to “implement protocols and procedures to require testing of any bulk shipment of ‘organic’ grain that meets minimum volume or monetary value thresholds and is presented for import at ports, docks, and border crossings of the United States.”

“We again urge the USDA to engage in emergency rulemaking to engender trust in the organic products for which consumers pay a premium. We strongly believe this is necessary to infuse confidence in the USDA organic label in light of the mounting evidence that significant quantities of conventional animal feed, represented as organic, have likely made their way into U.S. markets.”