This is the first of four posts by students in the UCLA Law Food Law and Policy Clinic on honey adulteration, honey litigation, and potential policy solutions to the problem of honey fraud.
By Terra Duchene, Aris Prince, Victoria Russell, Candace Yamanishi*
Honey litigation is in the news again. Like previous honey lawsuits such as the Honeygate scandal—in which honey fraudsters were arrested for selling fraudulent honey that passed through U.S. Customs with fraudulent country of origin documents—the honey lawsuit filed March 29, 2021, in United States District Court, Eastern District of California, is targeted at actors responsible for flooding the U.S. market with cheap adulterated honey. Unlike previous lawsuits, this lawsuit focuses on a different set of victims: U.S. beekeepers who have been overwhelmingly harmed by adulterated honey flooding into the North American market.
Numerous commercial beekeepers in the U.S. are sitting on millions of pounds of real honey that they cannot sell. Why? Because the market is flooded with cheap, adulterated honey from out of the country, and producers of real honey in the U.S. are forced to sell at a loss. The Food Law and Policy Clinic at UCLA, an experiential course that partners law students with local and regional non-profit organizations and community groups to advocate for food movements, was paired with lifelong American beekeeper Chris Hiatt. Hiatt is fighting for the survival of his second-generation family business, Hiatt Honey, which has been owned by five Hiatt brothers for over five decades. Hiatt advocates to keep commercial beekeepers in business by preventing the continued proliferation of adulterated honey and honey fraud in the U.S.
On Food Law 