Bill Alpert, Senior Editor at Barron’s Weekly, also had the guts to hit the nail square on the head.

Many consumers think organic food has been tested for pesticides. But organic certifiers spend most of their time shuffling papers and auditing the files of farmers for records indicating that forbidden chemicals weren't used. Inspectors are typically free-lancers who receive a couple of hundred bucks for visiting a farm.

Mischa Popoff of British Columbia, Canada, was one of those inspectors. He visited hundreds of farms on behalf of organic certifiers and believes most of the farmers were credibly organic. But Popoff was frustrated when he'd see farms whose "organic" fields were as green and pest free as their conventional fields. One farmer's garage hid gallons of the herbicide Roundup. When Popoff made a fuss about these suspicious findings, he ... was blacklisted by some certification outfits.

Conscientious farmers go to a lot of trouble to be organic, so they worry about competing with cheaters who just want the price premiums that an organic label can command. Popoff argues that routine pesticide tests could catch cheaters, the way that drug tests snare doped athletes. But in the 1990s when the organic industry was helping to draft the federal law on organic labelling, the industry considered and rejected a requirement that organic food be residue-tested.

(Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

For Bill's full article, "Do-Gooders Who Could Do Better" in Barron's click here.