Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (43 page)

Europeans particularly resented the lack of labeling, as it left them little choice at the marketplace. If labels were required, however, U.S. companies would have to take several complicated and expensive actions: segregate conventional crops from transgenic crops in fields as well as during storage, transport, and processing; document the traceability of the crops; and establish thresholds for levels of transgenic contamination. U.S. food producers oppose these measures as impractical and expensive, and international authorities have yet to agree on the lowest level of contaminating transgenes that will permit crops to be labeled “GM-free.”

The views of different countries on such issues are “harmonized” by the WTO, but also to a lesser extent by the Codex Alimentarius (food code) Commission of the United Nations. In 1994, an international consumers’ group petitioned the Codex to develop standards for mandatory labeling of transgenic foods because “the burden of labeling should fall on those who wish to use and profit from biotechnology and not on those who choose not to use it”; the group renewed such requests through the 1990s. By 1999, public opinion in Europe, especially in Great Britain, overwhelmingly favored labeling and segregation of conventional crops
from transgenic crops. When the European Union asked the Codex Commission to require labels for all foods containing identifiable transgenic ingredients, only the United States and Argentina (which also exports transgenic crops) opposed this proposal.
⁴⁴
U.S. Codex representatives argue that the true purpose of calls for labeling is to protect European trade restrictions: “a mandatory process-based label on genetically engineered food has the potential to be perceived by many consumers as a warning label that the product is unsafe, and therefore could be misleading and, consequently, inappropriate as a mandatory international guideline. Foods derived from biotechnology are not inherently less safe than other foods.”
⁴⁵
Such arguments, along with the other concerns discussed here, convince critics that the goal of the food biotechnology industry is to control the world’s food supply for private profit, and that neither the industry nor governing bodies can be trusted to make decisions in the public interest—whether or not the products are safe.

We have seen that objections to genetically engineered foods focus as much on issues of distrust as they do on matters of safety, and are likely to continue to do so unless the industry ceases acting in ways that engender suspicion. Public protests against transgenic foods occurred more swiftly and dramatically in Europe, especially in Great Britain, than in the United States, not least because the British were better informed about the issues. At the peak of the “GM crisis” early in 1999, the seven largest daily newspapers in Great Britain ran hundreds of articles on the subject, nearly all of them negative. Many of the articles focused on the extent to which the Clinton administration pressured the British government to accept American transgenic crops and collaborated in efforts to get those crops approved by the European Union.
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Antibiotechnology advocacy—international and domestic—is a constant source of worry to the industry. Such advocacy forms part of a larger trend in organized opposition to other aspects of globalization. During the 1990s, the number of international nongovernmental organizations increased from 6,000 to 26,000, and thousands of such groups exist in the United States alone. These groups are increasingly effective at the corporate, national, and international levels, and business analysts consider them especially difficult to manage because of their skill at using the Internet—an uncontrollable venue—to mobilize support. Yet another irony is the complaint of industry leaders that groups opposed to food
biotechnology are so well funded. They point to Greenpeace, for example, which attracts a worldwide income of more than $100 million annually. This amount may seem large, but it is minuscule in comparison to the annual income of the large biotechnology corporations whose officials make that complaint.
⁴⁷

Advocacy has been slower to develop in the United States than in Europe, perhaps because Americans generally are less politically active, but also because they tend to have more positive attitudes toward technology, greater trust in regulatory agencies, and less immediate contact with agriculture. Nevertheless, opposition to food biotechnology exists in this country and appears to be growing. Advocacy groups include environmental organizations (such as Environmental Defense, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Sierra Club) but also an extraordinary variety of less familiar organizations such as the International Center for Technology Assessment, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the International Forum on Globalization, and the Rainforest Action Network. Countless local groups like NW Rage (Northwest Resistance against Genetic Engineering) educate members “to resist the intrusion of genetic engineering . . . into our lives.”
⁴⁸
Coalition groups like Genetically Engineered Food Alert demand that food companies refuse to use genetically modified ingredients. Most organizing occurs through dozens of antibiotechnology Internet Web sites and electronic mail services that keep subscribers well informed about the daily actions of companies, government regulators, and critics.
⁴⁹
Biotechnology companies appear helpless in the face of such tactics and make little attempt to counter them beyond statements on their own Web sites and in the public relations campaigns of the Council for Biotechnology Information (
figures 12
,
14
, and
17
).

Away from the Internet, action against food biotechnology takes many forms, nearly all of which mix safety with other issues to evoke distrust, dismay, contempt, or outrage. To begin with, advocates write books—lots of them. My personal collection includes two or three dozen, of which at least ten were written for a popular audience just from 1998 to 2002.
⁵⁰
Books on the ethics of food biotechnology form an additional publishing genre. I am not the only person who collects such volumes. The geneticist Richard Lewontin reviewed his own collection of books and found that most opposed genetically modified foods for reasons that he judged muddled. He said, “whatever fears [one] might have of possible allergic reactions to food produced from genetically modified organisms, they are not more unsettling than the allergies induced . . . by the quality of the arguments about them. . . . Even the most judicious and seemingly dispassionate examinations of the scientific questions turn out, in the end, to be manifestoes.”
⁵¹
By this, he seemed to mean that critics do not clearly distinguish scientific concerns about safety from concerns about social issues.

FIGURE 27
. Greenpeace uses cards like this one to generate support for campaigns to stop sales of genetically modified foods. Text on the back of the card explains why companies should stop selling genetically engineered food and what consumers can do to encourage that action. (Courtesy of Greenpeace, 2000.)

The books have a political effect, but not always the one intended. Among the most recent, only one favors food biotechnology:
Pandora’s Picnic Basket
.
⁵²
Although written by a scientist who claims to be objective, this book also can be viewed as a manifesto. An instructor in my New York University department assigned it to a graduate class on contemporary food issues. He said the class found the science parts useful but also found the book infuriatingly patronizing, biased in coverage, and lacking in coherent social analysis. Informing the public about science is valuable, but that alone is not nearly enough to help people understand how scientific and social issues interact in matters of public policy.

Greenpeace is especially adept at producing materials that use scientific concerns about safety to score points about distrust.
Figure 27
gives my favorite example: using the “horror” of transgenic foods to emphasize the lack of transparency in marketing. Another example: at the time of the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, a coalition of more than 60 nonprofit groups (The Turning Point Project) placed a series of full-page advertisements on food biotechnology and globalization in the
New York Times
. One, headlined “Unlabeled, Untested . . . and You’re Eating It” (October 18, 1999), listed common food products containing genetically modified ingredients and discussed the hazards of toxicity, allergic reactions, and antibiotic resistance. Subsequent advertisements provided lengthy and thought-provoking discussions of various health, environmental, or economic consequences of biotechnology or economic globalization, along with information about how to learn more about such issues.
Figure 28
gives yet another example—this one, a painting—of the commingling of safety and social issues as they apply to transgenic foods.

FIGURE 28
. In conjunction with an exhibition of artworks on the theme “artists picturing our genetic future,” Alexis Rockman’s
The Farm
appeared on a lower Manhattan billboard (Lafayette and Houston Streets) in fall 2000. (Courtesy of Alexis Rockman and Creative Time; photograph by Charlie Samuels.)

This commingling of safety with other issues is most visible in street demonstrations. The 1999 FDA labeling hearings, for example, attracted protests in all three cities where they were held (
figure 18
,
page 190
). The
Oakland, California, hearing attracted 500 antibiotechnology demonstrators and received much attention from the press, largely because it also drew a smaller group of counter-demonstrators. These were researchers and graduate students from the nearby University of California, Berkeley, Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, infamous for having been “bought” by Novartis the year before (the department had auctioned itself to Novartis in an exclusive partnership arrangement giving that company the right to select faculty, review research results prior to publication, negotiate licensing agreements, and veto faculty decisions in some areas).
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They said they were demonstrating “out of concern that the public was not being informed about the benefits of biotechnology.”
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Advocates also use the legal system to pursue antibiotechnology goals. In 2001 alone, 36 states considered bills aimed at transgenic foods: restricting plantings or sales; requiring labeling, notification, tracking, or evaluation of environmental impact; banning terminator technology; or prohibiting the use of such foods in school lunch programs. Few such bills pass, however. By 2001, Maryland was the only state to ban a genetically modified food, in this case fish in waterways that connect to other bodies of water.
⁵⁵
Consumer groups, chefs, and some scientists have filed lawsuits and organized petition campaigns to compel the FDA to institute labeling and safety testing. The Alliance for Bio-Integrity (Iowa City, IA), led by Steven Druker, has filed such suits. Other suits argue that transgenic manipulations make it impossible to observe religious dietary laws; one was cosigned by 113 Christians, 37 Jews, 12 Buddhists, and 122 people who checked, “my faith is not easily categorized.” Still others have filed antitrust lawsuits based on the idea that the industry’s control over seeds inhibits competition. A petition organized by Mothers for Natural Law collected an astounding number of signatures—nearly 500,000—from people favoring transparency in labeling. Jeremy Rifkin organized a class-action suit against Monsanto arguing that the company is part of an international conspiracy to control the world’s corn and soybean supply through intimidation and deceptive business practices. Regardless of the outcome of the bills and lawsuits, they force attention to be paid to societal as well as safety issues.
⁵⁶

Such methods may annoy (and sometimes infuriate) biotechnology companies, government regulators, and scientists, but they are traditional ways of taking political action in a pluralistic democracy; they are legal, fair, and—given the many reasons for distrust—thoroughly justifiable. Transgenic sabotage, however, is another matter. When Ingo Potrykus complains about “those who would damage humanitarian projects” (discussed
in
chapter 5
), he worries most that vandals will destroy test plantings of Golden Rice. In Great Britain, Greenpeace and other groups conducted “destruction actions” against test plots of transgenic crops, sometimes dressed in full-body anticontamination suits and goggles. In the United States, numerous incidents of uprooting transgenic crops, trashing laboratories, burning genetic engineering materials, and making personal threats against scientists cross a legal line and enter into the realm of food terrorism.
⁵⁷
Such actions undermine the legitimacy of the political goals they are designed to accomplish, as do the controlling actions of corporations (see concluding chapter).