A recent investigation by the US personal finance site, NerdWallet reveals that some fruit are incorrectly labelled as organic when they are not. The report states that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is aware that some labelling fraud is occurring, but it has not taken necessary action to ensure the integrity of the organic label. NerdWallet found that pineapples grown in Costa Rica by the Del Valle Verde Corp. pineapples (under the brand name "Costa Verde") were approved as organic by a USDA-accredited certifier, even though the grower was using pesticides that are not approved as organic, among other practices not conforming with the US organic regulations. The USDA had investigated the case but no action has been taken. The author of NerdWallet blog also found that a Costa Rican exporter, Ricardo Rudin Mathieu, mislabelled roughly 400,000 pineapples as organic, and those pineapples were later shipped to the U.S. and Canada.
Read the article at: US Organic fruit fraud, and the NerdWallet blog
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