Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (44 page)

Protests against genetically modified foods—or the threat of such protests—affect the behavior of retailers who understand that consumers can choose to buy organic products, now labeled as such. Many companies label their products “GM-free” (see
figure 25
,
page 226
). In the late 1990s, Gerber’s and Heinz announced that they would stop using genetically modified ingredients in their baby foods, and McDonald’s “quietly” told farmers to stop growing Monsanto’s transgenic potatoes. Frito-Lay told its suppliers not to grow transgenic corn, and Archer Daniels Midland warned its grain suppliers to begin segregating bioengineered crops. Corn growers viewed such developments as a clear sign that “GM organisms have become the albatross around the neck of farmers.”
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The loss of both domestic and foreign sales outlets coupled with more general problems of overproduction caused corn prices to drop to their lowest point in ten years. As a partial remedy, the American Corn Growers Association advised its members to consider planting only conventional seeds. Wall Street analysts were well aware of this problem, seeing current events as very bad news for farmers, seed companies, and seed stocks. They predicted that premium prices would go to conventional rather than transgenic crops because “GMOs are good science but bad politics.”
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Their predictions were correct; corn acres planted in genetically modified seeds fell from 25 million in 1999 to just over 16 million in 2001. By then, more than half of the Midwest grain elevators required segregation of transgenic seeds, and 20% were offering premium prices for conventional corn or soybeans.
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In part because of objections to transgenic varieties, revenues from U.S. corn exports fell drastically from 1996 to 2000. Exports to Japan fell from $2.4 billion to $1.5 billion (a decline of 38%), to Taiwan from $960 million to $460 million (52%), and to European Union
countries from $413 million to $69 million (83%).
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Despite these reactions, genetically engineered traits are widely dispersed in the environment, and transgenic ingredients pervade the food supply.

Figuring out what to do about this confusing picture preoccupies federal agencies responsible for the regulation of transgenic foods. They worry that food biotechnology will suffer the fate of nuclear power and that its potential benefits will be lost to humanity. Like public protests over early recombinant-DNA experiments, those over food biotechnology may become muted if companies produce genetically modified foods that really do make farming more efficient or benefit consumers. What cannot be predicted is the strength and persistence of public distrust or the willingness of the industry to respond to it and submit the products and marketing methods to greater scrutiny. To help the industry gain public approval, federal agencies recruit advisory organizations to bring together groups of disparate stakeholders to seek points of agreement. As a participant in several such meetings, I can attest that they require people with differing perspectives to listen to one another (itself a step forward) and to attempt to identify issues of consensus. These meetings invariably identify labeling, segregation, traceability, and government oversight as necessary first steps toward achieving public confidence. Although reaching consensus on such steps may never be possible, such meetings permit participants to discuss matters that extend beyond safety and place societal issues of trust firmly on the agenda.

The messy political debates about food biotechnology are not likely to be resolved soon without major changes in the ways the industry conducts business. Genetically engineered foods may be relatively safe by the standards of science-based approaches to risk assessment, but industry decisions have caused them to rank high on the dread-and-outrage scale. To inspire public confidence, the industry must share control of the food supply with consumers. Until people actually have some choice about whether to consume transgenic foods, there is little reason to accept them. Companies need to label the foods and keep them separate from conventional foods. They also need to make more serious efforts to ensure that transgenes do not escape into the wild. They must work with organic farmers to prevent transgenic contamination of organic crops, and they must stop using public relations to “sell” people on the idea that the products are necessary and safe. If biotechnology companies want to convince people that their foods are beneficial, they must make products that
are
beneficial—to consumers and to society. Finally, they must stop acting so aggressively against people who raise questions about the
products, stop prosecuting small-scale “violators” of patent rights, and stop insisting that science education—important as it is—will solve the industry’s public relations problems. Even some industry supporters understand that biotechnology companies need to become less disingenuous, and set some restraints on “their insatiable appetite for control.”
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If food biotechnology does have benefits for individuals and society—and it is still too early to say whether it does—such benefits can only be achieved when the products are viewed as low in science-based safety risk as well as in value-based dread and outrage.

If companies are going to claim that their work will solve world food problems, they need to put substantial resources into working with scientists in developing countries to help farmers produce more food under local conditions. Such efforts could prove worthwhile if supported by policies designed to support sustainable and organic agriculture, protect against environmental risks, and prevent exploitation of small farmers or of consumers. For some years now, I have suggested that the industry institute a “tithing” program and apply 10% of income to research on projects that address the food needs of developing countries, regardless of their eventual profitability. This approach might indicate that the industry recognizes the difference between its commercial and humanitarian goals. Although I am not aware of any company that has taken on this challenge, I continue to believe that to be perceived as credible, the industry must
be
credible.

If government agencies want to promote food biotechnology, they are going to have to regulate it more effectively. They must insist that companies label, segregate, and ensure the traceability of genetically engineered crops, provide adequate areas of refuge, and keep their transgenes from pollinating out of control. Government regulators should be working with industry to figure out how to label the products and establish workable thresholds for transgenic contaminants. On the international level, they should stop obstructing multinational agreements and cooperate with government policies of other countries. They should grant consumer protection at least the same level of priority as promotion of industry objectives. Federal regulators must recognize as well that science-based decisions also have political dimensions and must find ways to consider societal and environmental implications when approving genetically modified foods.

And what should the public think or do about food biotechnology? As with other aspects of food politics, much depends on point of view. Eating foods containing transgenic ingredients appears unlikely to cause
direct harm to human health, but at the moment there also is little evidence for benefit. If a goal is to reduce pesticides in the environment, genetically modifying foods may be an appropriate method for achieving that goal, but so may other methods that also deserve consideration. If the ultimate goal is to ensure food security for the world’s population, other means to do so deserve equal time and resources. Overall, the role of genetically modified foods in these larger aspects of the food system is as yet uncertain and unlikely to be known for some time to come.

With that said, we now turn to the concluding chapter in which we will examine some emerging food safety issues. Like food biotechnology, these issues are relatively low in science-based risk but relatively high in dread: mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, anthrax, and other potential weapons of food bioterrorism.

PUBLIC HEALTH VERSUS BIOTERRORISM

SAFE FOOD IS ONE OF THE GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS OF TWENTIETH
-century public health, a result of scientific advances in refrigeration, pasteurization, insecticides, and disease surveillance. This book proposes that food safety also depends on politics. Any doubts about that idea should be thoroughly dispelled by the events of September 2001, when terrorists used airplanes as weapons of destruction and an anonymous correspondent sent letters filled with anthrax spores to civic and media leaders. One consequence of these events was to reveal the vulnerability of food and water supplies to malevolent tampering. Another was to expose the glaring gaps in federal oversight of food safety.
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This concluding chapter examines emerging food safety threats in these contexts. Some of the threats are diseases that affect farm animals and only rarely cause disease in humans. Even so, their effects on human welfare can be profound: massive destruction of food animals, loss of livelihoods and community, and restrictions on personal liberty. The outbreaks of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease that occurred in Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s, for example, were destructive, but they occurred as accidental results of production practices. In contrast, bioterrorism is deliberate—the purposeful use of biological or chemical materials to achieve political goals. Bioterrorism introduces a new and especially frightening political dimension to food safety risk: the
intention
to cause harm, regardless of who gets hurt.

In this chapter, we will see how bioterrorism brings up questions of food security and expands the common meaning of that term. In the United States, food security usually refers to the reliability of a family’s
food supply; people who lack food security qualify for federal or private food assistance. Since the anthrax mailings, food security has also come to mean “food safe from bioterrorism.” We begin our discussion of this definitional transition with diseases of farm animals: mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, and anthrax. In recent years, these diseases did not exist or were rare veterinary problems posing relatively little risk to human health. Today, we are concerned about their potential to make us ill, create havoc in the food system, or become tools of bioterrorism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how we—as a society and as individuals—can take action to address the problems and politics of food safety, now and in the future.

Because one consequence of globalization is the rapid transport of food across national borders and over long distances, a disease that affects the food supply can travel rapidly from one country to another. Animal diseases have trade implications; if a country harbors sick animals, no other country will accept its meat. Trade implications have political consequences.

As we will see, the British epidemics of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease occurred as inadvertent results of meat production practices. In contrast, the U.S. anthrax mailings were a deliberate act. All three risks, however, rank high in dread; they are involuntary, uncontrollable, and cause exotic disease. Just as important, they undermine trust in the food supply and in government and divert resources from more pressing matters of public health.

Mad cow disease emerged as a highly publicized food safety crisis of the mid-1990s, largely confined to Great Britain. The story of this disease is relevant to our discussion for its interweaving of politics and science and its effect on public confidence. The manner in which British officials handled the mad cow crisis, for example, later contributed to public distrust of genetically modified foods. Prior to the early 1980s, hardly anyone had heard of the disease, but by 1999 it had affected at least 175,000 British cows. Its results were catastrophic: destruction of more than 4 million cattle, estimated costs of $7 billion, transmission to at least 18 countries, and worldwide rejection of British beef. By 2001, although
“only” about 120 people had died of the human variant of mad cow disease, more deaths—perhaps as many as 100,000—were expected.
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Because this story reveals many aspects of the modern politics of food safety, it is well worth recounting.

The mad cow epidemic originated in the late 1970s when the political climate in Great Britain favored cost cutting and deregulation—in this case, of the meat-rendering industry. This industry converts the otherwise unusable (offal) parts of dead animals into “meat-and-bone meal” used to supplement the diets of farm animals. In Britain, rendering then involved the use of organic solvents and steam applied under high pressure; this process sterilized the resulting mess and killed anything that might be infectious. The solvents were dangerously flammable, however, and the energy costs high. In the late 1970s, the British industry—but not renderers in other countries—adopted a cheaper method, one that omitted solvents and cooked the offal at lower temperatures. Most rendering plants in Great Britain switched to that system by the early 1980s.
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The new method killed most bacteria and viruses. It did not, however, inactivate
prions
, a generic term for the highly unusual infectious agents believed to cause a disease called scrapie in sheep and related diseases in other animals. These invariably fatal diseases affect the brain and nervous system; they are called spongiform encephalopathies because they cause sponge-like holes in the brains of animals and people. Prion diseases present fascinating biological problems. They appear to involve transmission via
proteins
(rather than bacteria, viruses, or DNA), as well as “species jumps” from one kind of animal to another. In the era before mad cow disease, prion diseases seemed to be confined to their particular host animal. Scrapie, for example, affected sheep in Britain for at least three centuries but did not bother people. Instead, people exhibited their own specific and rare form of the disease, as did cows; both appeared spontaneously and were considered “sporadic.” At this point, we need to know the names of these diseases: scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in people.
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Because of the way sick cows behave, BSE soon became known as mad cow disease. In turn, mad cow disease soon emerged as the link between prion diseases in sheep and in people.
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