Higher Likelihood of Recall for Organic, Natural Products? 33032

Higher Likelihood of Recall for Organic, Natural Products?

WASHINGTON--Products labeled "organic" or "allnatural" are eight times more likely to be recalled for safety-relatedproblems than conventional foods, according to a review conducted by the HudsonInstitute's Center for Global Food Issues (www.hudson.org).The review included nine months of data--encompassing August 2001 to April2002--gathered from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada recallrecords. The review was conducted after Alex Avery, director of research at thecenter, and colleagues noticed a trend for organic and natural products to bethe subject of warnings and recalls.

According to Avery's data compilation, organic and natural foods made up 9percent of total food safety warnings in April, 22 percent in March, 2 percentin February and 7 percent in January. The statement that organic and naturalproducts are eight times more likely to be recalled was based on the fact that,compared to the conventional food market, organic and natural food makes up avery small percentage of the U.S. and Canadian food market.

"I don't want to claim these numbers have any greater precision thanthey actually do," Avery said. "Organic is widely considered to beabout 1 percent of the U.S. and Canadian food supply, so if they make up 8.5percent of the warnings and recalls, that's disproportionate to their totalshare of the food market."

For the purpose of Avery's review, products labeled as organic or naturalwere included in that category for comparison to conventional products."This is where it gets a bit fuzzy," Avery said. "It's verydifficult to know what the total percentage of products are organic and natural.... We went by what the [label] stated."

Reasons listed in the report for recalls of organic and natural productsincluded failure to label products with allergenicity information, mislabeling,bacterial contamination and other safety-related concerns. "There weresimilar recalls for the non-organic and -natural products throughout this wholetime," Avery noted. "I want to emphasize [the fact that] the NorthAmerican food market is still the safest in the world by many accounts. Thisindicates that the system that both Canada and the U.S. have in place, which theretailers and manufacturers work with, works quite well. These manufacturers andproduct retailers are proud of the fact that they are very vigilant aboutrecalls and warnings."

The report also indicated that some retailers--Whole Foods Markets,specifically--had multiple violations for the same products. In a statement, thecenter urged consumers to be aware of food recalls, but to keep in mind that theCanadian and U.S. food systems are among the safest in the world. The centeralso mentioned a U.S. Centers for Disease Control report from February thatdemonstrated a five-year decline in the number of food-borne illnesses.

In response to Avery's report, the Organic Trade Association (OTA) released astatement, saying, "[OTA] objects to using faulty logic and fuzzy math toscare consumers away from organic products, a healthful and ecologically soundcategory of products. Organic and natural on labels do not mean thesame thing, yet Alex Avery repeatedly lumps these categories together. Based onthe information he presents--a few minutes of fact checking revealed errors inhis report--there is no way to draw any conclusions about the relativelikelihood of a recall of an organic product. ... [R]epeated abuses ofstatistics result in completely erroneous conclusions that are not to bebelieved."