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Do Organic Processes Eliminate Contamination?

Posted September 09, 2010 7:59 AM

The massive egg recall underway has many in the food industry comparing industrial agribusiness and smaller organic processors in an effort to determine the best solution to the salmonella problem. Is industrial food manufacture making it easier to spread disease to the consumer? Are organic farms the answer? Or is the problem much more complex than that? Has the government failed to regulate the industry properly?

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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: California
Posts: 2363
Good Answers: 63
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Re: Do Organic Processes Eliminate Contamination?

09/10/2010 12:23 PM

It is not that organic processes are cleaner, actually they have a tendency to be more prone to contamination, but there would be more smaller processors so the degree of contamination at one time across the market would be less. In otherwords you would have contamination occurring more commonly over time, but in smaller peaks. More people tend to get contamination over a period of time from small organic processes than large industrial, but 3 or 30 people a week continuously may not be as news worthy unlike a large scale recall for 1 month over a period of 30 years or so. The real problem at large centralized industrial levels is the lack of government oversight and enforcement, which is actually made easier by centralizing the operations. Smaller decentralized organic operations would be much more complicated to oversee and enforce, plus smaller operations tend to have more regulatory loop-holes due to public perceptions regarding small farming operations, they are frequently exempted from certain compliance regulations because of the perceive adverse financial impacts on the small family farms. On the other hand smaller oepration do not have the money to spend individually to bribe inspectors and lobby against government oversight (though as cooperatives they can end up having more lobbying power due to the public perception of small farming operations along with consolidation of funds).

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