The court found that the federal Organic Foods Production
Act of 1990 preempts state consumer lawsuits alleging violations of OFPA and
California’s federally approved state organic program (SOP) (codified under the
California Organic Products Act of 2003, COPA). “Congress made clear its
intention to preclude private enforcement through state consumer lawsuits in
order to achieve its objective of establishing a national standard for the use
of ‘organic’ and ‘USDA Organic’ in labeling agricultural products.” This
contrasts with other federal schemes where Congress didn’t intend to alter
citizens’ ability to file unfair competition claims or other claims vased on
violations of identical state laws. Instead, Congress mandated federal
oversight of state organic programs “to ensure consistent federal and state
government enforcement for violations of the Act.” COPA’s remedial scheme
doesn’t include private enforcement. Thus, conflict preemption applied; consumer
lawsuits based on COPA or OFPA violations “would frustrate the congressional
purpose of exclusive federal and state government prosecution and erode the
enforcement methods by which the Act was designed to create a national organic
standard.”
Herb Thyme has federal approval to label organically grown
herbs as USDA Organic, but allegedly mislabeled products that contained a mix
of organically and conventionally grown herbs with “Fresh Organic” and “USDA
Organic” labels. Quesada brought the usual California claims.
The court of appeals noted the presumption against
preemption of laws operating in traditional state domains. The presumption
applied with particular force to consumer protection laws. Moreover, the express preemption in OFPA was
directed at state organic certification laws, not state consumer lawsuits. This express preemption supported the
inference that Congress didn’t intend to preempt other claims, but didn’t require
that conclusion.
The court followed the 8th Circuit’s Aurora Dairy case, which found that
consumer protection claims against a certified milk producer for mislabeling
non-organic milk as organic were impliedly preempted. Given the certification, the producer was
authorized to label its products as organic. Uniform national standards would
be undermined if different court systems adopted possibly conflicting
interpretations of the same provisions of OFPA.
“Thus, state consumer law claims against a certified organic producer
seeking to hold it accountable for representing its products as organic when in
fact the products were not, are preempted.”
The allegations here, if found to be true by the certification agent,
would have precluded certification; thus certification and compliance are
interrelated. There should be no
situation in which a state court could find a certified grower to be mislabeling
its product as organic when the grower’s certification wasn’t revoked or
suspended. Although Aurora Dairy didn’t find all state consumer claims preempted, in
that case the facts necessary to support the claims (e.g., “our milk comes from
healthy cows”) had no bearing on whether the product met the organic
standard. (This isn’t actually true as
stated, but on the other hand the facts that would prove/disprove the claim
would be the same even if OFPA didn’t exist, unlike certification-related claims.)
Quesada argued that the fact that state law was identical to
federal law saved her claims, because no federal law as such was implicated,
citing Farm Raised Salmon Cases. Farm
Raised Salmon rejected the claim that, because there was no private cause
of action for violation of the FDCA, federal law impliedly barred consumer
suits based on identical state laws.
With the FDCA, Congress impliedly authorized identical state laws,
including an express savings clause in an uncodified provision of the NLEA, and
also the legislative history indicated the importance of state enforcement of
parallel state laws. With OPFA, the
coordinated state-federal regulatory scheme, the legislative history, and
congressional intent all distinguished this law from the FDCA. Under COPA, California’s SOP is the national organic program,
administered by the state. It’s not a
separate regime. Allowing states that
chose to have their own SOPs to privately enforce national standards could lead
to conflicting interpretations of the national standards. Plus, the legislative history referred to
enforcement by the feds, relevant state officials, and certifying agents; it
didn’t include reference to private enforcement, as the FDCA legislative
history did. Also, barring private
claims “furthers the congressional purpose and objective to nationalize organic
labeling standards and to avoid the inevitable divergence of applicable state
laws and enforcement strategies.” This
would conflict with Congress’s purpose of establishing national standards. Though Jones v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 912 F. Supp.
2d 889 (N.D. Cal. 2012), reached the opposite conclusion, the court wasn’t
bound by federal district court decisions.
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