"Oz" wrote in message
...
Jim Webster writes

that has been a major issue, because there isn't actually any way of
telling
organic and convention produce appart, hence how do you prove someone has
been doing the 'conversion'

With great difficulty.

For example you could have a circular trade between various suppliers
each exporting organic to the others but each adding 10% non-approved.
One could quite quickly end up with several times the original quantity
but the documentation would suggest any infringement was quite minor.


it is probably too late to set up organic standards that were based on
rationally defined rules.
For example it would be comparatively easy to say that organic must not be
GM (at least where you can test for DNA) assuming that you feel that GM is
'a bad thing'.

But insisting organic is defined by practices which leave no traces on the
product is a bit silly.
An example is chemical residues. The regular tests done by government show
that imported produce is the biggest source of residues, not home produced,
whether organic or conventional

Jim Webster