The spring meeting of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will be held virtually next month, with opportunities for both written and oral comments. NOSB members will hear public comments via webinar on April 20th and 22nd from 12:00 – 5:00 pm ET. To provide oral comments, be sure to register at this link by April 5.
Available for public comment is a discussion document on the topic of excluded methods, a complicated area of organic policy that requires a close examination of current plant breeding and crop improvement techniques to determine their alignment with the excluded methods definition. The discussion document summarizes the work of the NOSB to date on this topic and asks important questions of the organic community to further the board’s thinking and work in determining which methods should be excluded from organic production and which should be allowed.
In 2016, the NOSB passed a policy proposal that provides a framework for evaluating whether a method should be allowed or excluded. Since that time, the NOSB has provided clarity on a dozen methods, but there is more work to do. To educate and support the organic community’s work in this area of policy, OSA co-hosted a listening session on excluded methods in organic production to dig into some of the plant breeding and crop improvement methods in question. The recording is here.
Written comments on this discussion document and other NOSB meeting materials are due April 5, and should be submitted at this link.
Questions? Contact OSA’s Kiki Hubbard.
