Organic certifiers seem to always have to sustain a never ending effort by various special interest groups to sway the processes they use to determine what is and is not organic. One organic certifier which appears to have been swayed is EcoCert.
NOTE:
EcoCert is one of the world's largest organic certifiers. They based in France and cover 80 plus countries. Over the past few years there have been serious accusations regarding how EcoCert conducts their certification process.
The Organic Consumers Association says this about EcoCert:
"EcoCert is a French based certifier with a standard that allows not only cleansing ingredients made from conventional versus organic agriculture.....despite EcoCert's own regulations prohibiting the labeling as "Organic" of a product containing less than 100% organic content, EcoCert in practice engages in "creative misinterpretation" of its own rules in order to accommodate clients engaging in organic mislabeling.... Explicitly relying on the weak EcoCert standard as precedent, the new Organic and Sustainable Industry Standard ("OASIS")- a standard indeed developed exclusively by certain members of the industry with no consumer input"
You can read the OCA document here to gain more insight into the issues with EcoCert and OASIS.
You can also personally "look over EcoCert's shoulder", so to speak, if you follow this link to the EcoCert site. What can I say, every once in a while, organizations are set up to look as though they are here to protect us, the consumers, from unscrupulous marketing when in fact they are actually part of the problem.