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Food "Safety" Reform and the Covert Continuation of the Enclosure Movement

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Any Food Safety Reform with Teeth Doomed by Trade Agreements

The key to understanding why nothing in this legislation will make our food safer requires understanding the role of trade rules enforced by the World Trade Organization. Though ignored by the media, congressional representatives, senators and "Make Our Food Safe," the coalition of groups pushing the legislation, the inconvenient fact is that WTO rules specify adherence to the "equivalency" system. As explained byLori Wallach and Patrick Woodall of Public Citizen in Whose Trade Organization: A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO, "The WTO's terms contribute to these food-safety problems not only by leading to substantially increasing food trade, but by constraining governments' ability to address problems posed by foodborne illnesses. Not only have nations' food safety laws come under threat in the powerful dispute-resolution body of the WTO, but WTO rules embodied in the WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement harm public well-being by encouraging an ongoing race to the bottom in food-safety standards." [29]

A 2007 report by Public Citizen also warned of this problem. In a report entitled "Trade Deficit in Food Safety: Proposed NAFTA Expansions Replicate Limits on US Food Safety Policy That Are Contributing to Unsafe Food Imports" the authors explained that "Trade rules contained in NAFTA, the WTO and incorporated into the new FTAs pending before Congress forbid special safety requirements for imports. Even though border inspections of imports may be the only food safety check on imported foods relative to the domestic food safety system which includes several levels of oversight, trade agreements "non-discrimination" or "national treatment" rules require that the United States not inspect imported foods at a greater rate than domestic foods. Further, the trade agreements require the United States to rely on foreign regulatory structures and foreign safety inspectors to ensure that food imports are safe. This includes rules that obligate the United States to find the different -- perhaps less safe -- meat and poultry inspection systems of importing countries to be "equivalent" to the U.S. system, and then allow "free passage" of products from such countries."[30]

The take-away message is clear: the US can't require foreign producers in less developed nations to have a system that is equal to ours; we have to accept their different or lower standards as equivalent to domestic standards. Nevertheless, the legislation will hold domestic producers to higher standards than foreign producers. Once you understand this reality, the argument that thelegislation is needed to improve the safety of imported food reveals itself to be a fraud.

Despite the fact that the World Health Organization identifies globalization of the food supply as a key cause of foodborne illness worldwide, such trade will increase, even displacing US production. We are legally prohibited from doing anything meaningful about it, unless we're willing to sustain vast fines or withdraw from the WTO. As explained by Helena Paul and Richard Steinbrecher in Hungry Corporations: Transnational Biotech Companies Colonise the Food Chain, "The World Trade Organization (WTO), created out of the GATT in 1994, is a perfect vehicle for extending corporate rights. Unlike other international instruments, it has legislative and judicial powers that can be enforced against states through its complaints mechanism. Governments can use this procedure to change laws and lower environmental and social standards in the interests of "free trade.' Yet it does nothing to limit the ability of transnationals to use their economic power to drive competitors out of the market by unfair means; absorb competitors through mergers and acquisitions; or form strategic alliances with competitors to share technology, production facilities and markets.'" [31]

It's long past time we understood that the call for "free trade" is a euphemism for supranational control. When barriers to trade are removed, the obstacles being removed are the protections necessary to preserve a nation's economic and social welfare. The removal of these protections have hurt people worldwide while transferring control of national resources and sovereignty itself -- to supranational transnational corporations that run the global food system.

Is Our Food Really That Unsafe?

Now that we understand how trade rules force us to accept as equivalent the safety regimes of less developed nations from which we import so much of our food supply, we should turn to another myth: the food safety "crisis" itself. With all the newspaper headlines endlessly trumpeting new food-borne illness outbreaks and numerous articles profiling the stories of the victims of the most dangerous cases of E. coli O157:H7 food contamination, people can't be blamed for getting the idea that something is terribly wrong with the safety of our food supply. However, perception isn't always reality. And perception especially one manufactured to gain a population's consent for something to which it wouldn't normally agree can be a very powerful thing.

As Edward Bernays observed in his 1928 work Propaganda, a little book that became a sort of bible for the public relations industry, "No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group of leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichà ©s and verbal formulas supplied to them by their leaders."[32] Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, understood better than most that nothing aids the manufacture of perception like a good dose of fear.

Using a page from Bernay's playbook, the wealthy trusts and foundations that are generously underwriting the public policy campaign waged by Make Our Food Safe, the consortium of groups tirelessly pushing for food "safety" reform, repeatedly employ fear to their advantage. One such effort is the"Produce Safety Project" at Georgetown University, an enterprise funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which published in February a report that recalculated the "Health-Related Costs of Foodborne Illness in the United States."[33] The stated purpose of the study "is to provide policymakers with measures of the economic burden of foodborne illnesses both at the aggregate level and at the pathogen level." The report's author, Robert Scharff, received a grant of $47,000 for his work,[34] which recalculates the economic costs associated with foodborne illness. His new estimate dramatically increased previous estimates of $6 billion to $38 billion a year to $152 billion a year -- a piercing headline screamer guaranteed to heighten public pressure on the Senate to hurry up and pass the legislation.

While Scharff's math itself isn't a problem, the figures on which he bases his calculations present numerous problems. The figures, derived from the 1999 Mead Study and adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have been the subject of much debate. The Mead Study, entitled "Food-Related Illness and Death in the United States,"[35] is the source for the infamous sentence "We estimate that foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year." This sentence has become a mantra of sorts, repeated endlessly by practically everyone demanding that the government do something to make our food safe. Along the way, most people seem to forget the figures are estimates and not necessarily an accurate picture of reality, because they are based on multipliers as large as 40 for every actual case proven to be caused by foodborne pathogen.

Journalist David Gumpert has examined the report and makes a number of perceptive points. He notes that not only is the study ten years old "but the data it draws on goes back as far as 1948."[36] Gumpert also points out that the numbers appear to be "wild estimates of the real situation": "Even allowing for the multiplier effect the likelihood that for every reported illness, there may be between ten and forty times that number not reported the numbers don't obviously add up to the millions projected by the CDC. Consider that in 2007, the CDC reported a total 21,183 cases of foodborne illness, based on reports from states and localities around the country. Multiplying that by 40, you still only get 847,000 illnesses, a far cry from 76 million."[37]

Gumpert also notes that the cases of reported foodborne illness counted by The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a key member of Make Our Food Safe, found "168,000 illnesses over the 17-year period 1990-2006. That averages out to fewer than 10,000 cases per year."[38]

The number of deaths attributed to foodborne illness also is a matter of debate. The Mead Study attributes a whopping 65% of the 5,000 deaths from foodborne illness to unknown pathogens. In a paper called "Death due to Unknown Foodborne Agents," Paul Frenzen, a demographer with the US Department of Agriculture reviewed the study's assumptions and finds a number of problems with the estimated deaths, and he urges additional research. Frenzen argues that "No direct evidence indicates that unknown agents transmitted by food are a major cause of premature death in the United States. The lack of evidence is not surprising because most microorganisms resist cultivation on artificial media, and pathogenic agents that are difficult to culture have undoubtedly eluded identification. The innovative study by Mead et al. has increased awareness of the effects of unknown foodborne agents on health. However, their estimate of deaths from unknown foodborne agents depended on accurately estimating deaths from gastroenteritis of unknown cause, a category assumed to include all deaths from unknown foodborne agents. In fact, some unknown foodborne agents do not cause gastroenteritis, and some deaths attributed to gastroenteritis of unknown cause probably involved known causes of gastroenteritis that were either not detected or not reported, including enteric infections, adverse drug reactions, and celiac disease. The estimate of deaths from unknown foodborne agents consequently omitted deaths from unknown foodborne agents that do not cause gastroenteritis and almost certainly overstated the number of deaths from unknown foodborne agents that cause gastroenteritis."[39]

And, of course, gastroenteritis can be due to many other things besides foodborne illness. A bad case of diarrhea can be caused by anxiety, consuming too much alcohol or coffee, medications, antibiotics, sweets, hot peppers, artificial fat (like Procter & Gamble's Olestra, which is noted for its propensity to cause anal leakage). Then there are conditions like celiac disease, Crohn's disease, diabetes, irritable bowl syndrome, lactose intolerance, pancreatis, ulcerative colitis, fructose malabsorption, and pernicious anemia that can direct one to the nearest bathroom pronto.

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Nicole Johnson is a researcher and activist living in Ventura county, California. Her kids wish she would go back to painting and stop worrying so much about the world.
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