Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (42 page)

Mexican Native Corn
. Plant pollen does not follow USDA rules; it follows air currents. During the FDA’s 1999 food labeling hearings, organic farmers testified that genetically altered pollen threatened the ability of their crops to qualify for organic certification. Later, the StarLink episode demonstrated how easy it was to commingle genetically modified seeds with conventional seeds. By 2001, transgenes could be found anywhere anyone looked for them: in fields certified as organic, fields of conventionally grown crops, grain shipments to Japan, food aid to Latin America, fields in countries that had banned transgenic crops, and “GM-free” products. Events the following year confirmed such observations. Monsanto and Aventis CropScience admitted that genetically modified canola seeds, not yet approved by the FDA, “might have found their way” into planted crops, and Australian scientists showed that genes from genetically modified canola readily transfer to conventional canola in neighboring fields.
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Such incidents evoke images of accidents: Pandora’s box and genies out of bottles. They also evoke a more sinister image—the Trojan horse—the
deliberate
manipulation of the food supply to undermine regulatory controls and consumer choice at the marketplace. As Friends of the Earth explained, “Legal frameworks were supposed to be adequate to ensure that GMOs wouldn’t endanger the environment or human health. Biotech companies were supposed to comply with those frameworks. Regulatory bodies were supposed to monitor and oversee GMO releases to ensure they were complying with the legal frameworks. But the reality shows a completely different picture.”
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Nowhere is the reality more starkly displayed than in the case of transgenic “pollution” of native maize grown in Mexico, where corn originated and where corn biodiversity is treasured. Early in 2000, letters to
Science
warned colleagues that the “introduction of transgenic maize varieties in Mexico may pose a risk to landraces or wild relatives of maize in its ancestral home,” and “the direction of gene flow is more likely to occur from [transgenic] cultivars to the wild plants.” According to
Sierra
magazine, transgenic corn came to Mexico “courtesy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which opened the Mexican market
to cheap grain from
el norte
”; Mexico now imports three times as much corn from the United States as it did prior to NAFTA. To protect the country’s corn heritage, Mexico banned the cultivation of transgenic varieties in 1998 but is unable to completely enforce this ruling.
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In 2001, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found transgenic corn growing in 15 of 22 remote areas of Oaxaca and Ixtlán and reported these findings in the prestigious British journal
Nature
. Val Giddings of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) told a reporter from
USA Today
that the report posed no
safety
issues: “If there’s any impact at all, it’s likely to be positive. There are zero human health implications, zero environmental impact implications.”
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Perhaps so, but the uncontrolled spread of genetically modified traits to plants where they are not supposed to be has 100% implications for public trust in the industry and its government regulators—and for generating outrage.

To head off such reactions, industry supporters launched a remarkably nasty public relations campaign to discredit the Berkeley investigators. The campaign focused on their science and their politics. The researchers made two claims in the
Nature
paper; transgenes existed in native maize, and the transgenes were unstable (meaning that they could spread more easily). The discrediting campaign focused exclusively on the second claim. A public relations firm—one that specializes in using the Internet to lobby—recruited scientists to write letters identifying flaws in the methods used to demonstrate genetic instability. On this basis, the editor of
Nature
did something highly unusual (if not unprecedented) in such scientific disputes. Stopping just short of calling the paper fraudulent, he published some of the critical letters along with an editorial note: “The evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper.” The researchers admitted some errors in methods, but reaffirmed their original conclusions.
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The public relations campaign also focused on the researchers’ politics. The senior author, Dr. Ignacio Chapela, held an untenured faculty appointment in the Berkeley plant biology department that auctioned itself into partnership with Novartis in 1998. Dr. Chapela had led faculty opposition to that partnership. Other faculty had accused his coauthor, a graduate student in that department, of antibiotechnology vandalism of their experimental crops (a charge he denied). Reporters investigating the matter guessed that Monsanto and other proindustry groups were behind the public relations campaign but were hiding that connection. Colleagues sympathetic to Dr. Chapela pointed out that most of the writers of the critical letters to
Nature
received all or part of their research
funding from an institute affiliated with Novartis (by this time, Syngenta), but also had not disclosed their competing interests.
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In the furor over the paper and its near retraction, one crucial fact is easily overlooked: nobody challenged the observation of transgenes in native corn. Indeed, Mexican scientists soon confirmed traces of transgenes in up to 36% of samples tested.
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In this sense, the public relations campaign succeeded brilliantly. It focused attention on complicated scientific issues and deflected attention from the crucial social issue—the escape of genetically modified traits into wild plant stocks. Regardless of the scientific merits of the research, the ferocity of the attack made it clear that neither the scientific establishment nor the biotechnology industry have much interest in keeping the new genetic traits under control.

Globalization elicits dread and outrage for two principal reasons. The first is the potential loss of national identity and autonomy to multinational corporations bent on maximizing profit. The second is the possibility that international regulatory bodies established to deal with globalization issues might make decisions that favor corporate interests at the expense of public welfare and social justice, especially in the areas of health, environmental protection, and food safety. From a business perspective, globalization is about open markets, low wages, and minimal regulations. Regulations, from this perspective, are costly and complicated barriers to selling products on international markets. If, for example, a country decides to invoke the precautionary principle and require premarket testing and labeling of genetically modified foods, it could refuse to buy U.S. crops that were not segregated and labeled. It is easy to see how international disputes about such matters could become difficult. Such disputes are resolved through three international bodies: the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Biosafety Protocol, and the Codex Alimentarius.

The increasingly powerful WTO is the most important of these bodies. Countries belonging to the United Nations created the WTO to develop, administer, and—most notably—enforce their trade agreements. The purpose of the WTO is to promote free trade, ideally through guarantees of fair and consistent treatment of exports from all member countries. WTO rules require member states to (1) consider all other members as equal trading partners, (2) treat all foreign corporations just as they treat their own, and (3) eliminate all competitive practices that might
give them an unfair advantage. In practice, however, richer countries can and do use the rules to their own advantage. The WTO especially raises suspicions because it conducts negotiations in secret.

The WTO replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995. From 1947 to 1994, GATT nations negotiated reductions in tariffs and other trade barriers through a series of discussion “rounds” identified by their location (the Uruguay Round of 1986–94, for example). By the time WTO succeeded GATT, the principal negotiations no longer concerned tariffs or intellectual property rights as much as they did issues related to environmental protection and food safety. For years, critics have complained that eliminating trade barriers will force countries to adhere to the lowest common denominator in food safety and environmental standards. As evidence, they point to WTO decisions that prevent France from rejecting hormone-fed beef raised in the United States or require the United States to accept Malaysian shrimp caught in nets that trap sea turtles. If WTO decides that genetically modified foods are safe, no member country is permitted to reject them.
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One reason why President Bill Clinton invited the WTO to meet in Seattle in 1999 was to resolve the “huge biotech problem” with European countries that were refusing American exports of transgenic corn and soybeans. Although most of the public demonstrations during that meeting were aimed at globalization in general (and labor and biopiracy issues in particular), they also focused on trade issues related to genetically modified foods.
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By the time of that meeting, international and national government groups were debating whether to allow the production or import of genetically modified foods, to require them to be labeled (and, if so, at what threshold level), or to ban them outright.

International decisions about such issues are difficult to track, as they change constantly in response to political pressures. When the European Union approved sales of transgenic corn in 1996, the biotechnology industry was optimistic that Europeans would readily accept genetically modified foods. In 1997, however, the European Parliament required the foods to be labeled, and in 1999 the European Union also required manufacturers to conduct risk assessments, public consultations, and post-market safety reviews. Some national governments permitted transgenic crops to be grown, but others did not. In mid-2000,
Time
magazine classified countries by their attitude toward genetically modified foods—pro-GM (Argentina, China), cautiously pro (Canada, U.S., India), very cautiously pro (Brazil, Japan), or strongly anti (Britain, France)—but the policies of these countries changed constantly in response to new information, ongoing pressures, and decisions of international bodies attempting to deal with issues raised by these foods.
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To illustrate the complexity of the international picture,
table 13
summarizes decisions about transgenic foods made by various countries
just
during the 2001 calendar year.

TABLE 13
. Actions of selected countries and the European Union regarding planting, labeling, or importing of genetically modified foods, 2001

SOURCE:
Food Chemical News
, 2001.

The inconsistent decisions of international bodies in dealing with genetically modified foods do little to engender trust that the system will operate in the public interest. In 1999, for example, the Biosafety Protocol, an international committee formed as a result of the 1992 biodiversity treaty forged in Rio de Janeiro, proposed to require shipments of
transgenic foods to be approved
in advance
by importing countries. The United States refused to sign the treaty, which was also opposed by other large food-exporting nations such as Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The reason: the requirement could institute “a draconian regime that we have never seen before except for highly toxic and hazardous substances.”
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In January 2000, delegates from 130 nations adopted the treaty, but with compromises; they permitted genetically modified foods to be exported without advance notice but allowed countries to decide for themselves whether transgenic foods, seeds, and microbes posed a threat to the environment. If countries decided to prohibit imports on that basis, they could. Industry leaders considered the compromise as a win and hoped that the treaty would help counter the perception that food biotechnology was not adequately regulated. Some European countries viewed such trade agreements as barely masked attempts to achieve political goals. Many Europeans resented U.S. trade restrictions against countries that conduct business with Iran, Libya, or Cuba, and perceived the aggressive marketing of American transgenic crops as arrogant, controlling, and insensitive. They thought the phrase, “what’s good for G.M. is good for America,” now meant that genetic modification had replaced General Motors as the symbol of United States corporate power.
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