No vacation is worth it unless they tell you that the flight is oversold and you don’t have a seat, but then you get a seat (yay!) on an aisle (not yay!) behind a crying baby (definitely not yay!).

Maybe he/she is as hungry and sleepy as I am. I’m also next to a woman eating a delicious looking and smelling breakfast. “It’s delicious”, she confirmed. In other good news, I’m not wearing a wet diaper… Or a dry one. And I’m going to Nassau.
#yay #nassau

I had a few thoughts to share as a precursor to the video and I thought about sharing my take on the message – how it affected me today. I’ll pass on that. Art is best expressed by virtue of the personal meaning bestowed upon it, and the inculcation of it, according to who you are. Beyoncé took me to church today..

Be who you are..

In today’s WSJ there is an article which casts doubt, not on the nature of organic foods outright, but on the systems and controls which are charged with their identification and regulation. It would appear that both our trust and food are being contaminated.

There is little to distinguish what is “organic” from other products grown and raised with pesticides and antibiotics but for a simple label. There is heavy reliance on trust and monitoring. As a Certified Internal Auditor and Certified Fraud Examiner, I am focused on business processes, their improvement, and their vulnerabilities to fraud; making this seemingly unrelated article all the more interesting to me. So how has the US been doing in regards to product labeling in the organic space?

Article highlights:
– There are 81 “certifying agents” in the US.
– 37 of those had a complete review this year by the Department of Agriculture, and of those, 23 did not properly conduct onsite inspections.
– Since 2005, 38 of the 81 have “failed on at least one occasion to uphold basic Agriculture Department standards”.
– Over the same period, “40% of these 81 certifiers have been flagged by the USDA for conducting incomplete inspections; 16% of certifiers failed to cite organic farms’ potential use of banned pesticides and antibiotics; and 5% failed to prevent potential commingling of organic and inorganic products”.

Let’s put these numbers in perspective. In spite of seeming small, 5% relates to the number of certifiers, not the amount of produce OR the number of farms for which they had certification responsibility. This is a point on which The Journal did not fully expound, or even truly address. In other words, it is extremely possible, even likely, that a significant amount of what is called “organic” is not, depending on the amount of product and produce covered by certifiers. Further, I suggest an increased likelihood, because additives not only increase numerical output (quantity), but also size and weight (quality?). Both of these factors translate into dollars. Further, labeling these items “organic” positively impacts the premium that a farmer could expect to receive. They would be effectively growing money on trees. And they could be.

Organic farms are not zoned exclusively, but are driven by the decision of the farmers to use or avoid pesticides and/or antibiotics. As such, run off from neighboring farms or contamination of the water table, making them susceptible to “pesticide drift”. This simply means that consumers are paying sometimes double the price for exactly the same products with different labels. When that is combined with these failed controls at certifiers, there is ample cause for worry.

Another related point not made in the article, perhaps even assumed by the article, is whether the Department of Agriculture itself has strong enough controls to thoroughly identify instances of failure at certifiers. This is possible, but not at all guaranteed. They have found some infractions, but to what extent? It should be noted that the Department is almost certainly using a sampling methodology in the selection of certifiers to test, in addition to the actual testing conducted. The problem is likely to be even larger than believed and reported – and it was reported because it was believed to be a big problem.

Irrespective, the seed of the problem (and solution) lies with the farmers. We are in effect asking farmers to decide between earnings related to a higher output, or earnings related to the “organic premium”. What makes us confident that they will all choose nobly when they can have their oranges and eat them too, when they can grow money on trees? Let’s hope that our trust is not misplaced. The WSJ analysis is a great starting point, but other serious questions blossom in a perpetual spring.

I just heard/read:
“In the end, everything will be all right. If it’s not all right, it’s not yet the end.”