1. A trade body on hormones
By Mark Weisbrot, 08/04/99
WASHINGTON, D.C. Should countries have the right to set health and
safety standards for the food their citizens eat? Should they be
allowed to exclude foreign-produced foods that don't meet national
standards? Or should these questions be decided by the World Trade
Organization?
Like it or not, these issues are being decided right now. In the
latest trade dispute between the world's two largest trading
partners, our government placed sanctions last week on $117 million
worth on European goods. The purpose of the sanctions is to force
the Europeans to import American beef raised with growth hormones.
Ordinarily this decision to place 100 percent tariffs on French
truffles, foie gras, and other delicacies most of us have never
tasted would violate our international trade agreements. But in
this case the United States has the backing of the World Trade
Organization, a 134-nation body that was created four years ago to
negotiate and govern world trade. The WTO has ruled that Europe's
ban on hormone-treated beef is illegal, and it authorized the
United States to impose retaliatory trade sanctions against the
European Union.
Consider the arguments: The Europeans don't allow beef treated with
growth hormones to be sold in their markets, regardless of where it
is produced. They just don't think it is all that safe to eat.
But most US beef is, in fact, treated with these hormones. So our
government, at the request of the beef industry, filed a complaint
at the WTO, arguing that the ban was an unfair restriction on
trade. The rules of the WTO say that any health or environmental
standard that affects trade must be supported by scientific
evidence. So the WTO appointed a three-judge panel, which decided
in March 1997 that there was not enough scientific evidence to
justify Europe's ban on hormone-treated beef. But two months ago
an independent panel of scientists asked by the European Commission
to consider these questions reached a different conclusion. The
scientists found that one of the six hormones commonly found in
beef is a ''complete carcinogen.'' The panel concluded that
further study would be needed on the other five hormones, although
anyone reading the 142-page report would undoubtedly wonder why we
Americans allow these drugs to be pumped into our own livestock.
We probably wouldn't, especially for consumption by those most
susceptible to the effects of the hormones, such as children and
pregnant women, if most people knew what they were eating. But
there are no labeling requirements for these extra ingredients in
your hamburger. Regardless of how one assesses the scientific
evidence, shouldn't the Europeans be allowed to err on the side of
caution if they so choose? Most people would say yes. This case
is particularly worrisome because everyone agrees that the law
against hormone-treated beef was designed to protect Europe's
consumers, not its domestic cattle industry. And the law applies
without discrimination to both domestic and foreign producers. Yet
the WTO insists that an unaccountable, three-judge panel meeting in
secret can overturn a European law simply because it has an adverse
impact on trade. The tail (trade) is wagging the dog (public
health) here, and this is exactly what environmental, consumer, and
labor groups warned would happen when the WTO was created four
years ago.
If Americans think this is only Europe's problem, they should look
at a few key WTO decisions in the last couple of years that have
gone against Americans. In 1997 the US Environmental Protection
Agency weakened its regulations on contaminants in imported
gasoline in order to comply with a WTO ruling that found these
rules to be an unfair trade barrier. The enforcement of our
Endangered Species Act -specifically, the protection of sea turtles
- has also been compromised by recent WTO rulings. From the point
of view of big business, and especially large multinational
corporations, these are not disturbing developments. For business
interests it is only natural to see human beings and our
environment as instruments of global trade and commerce. They are
quite comfortable with having these decisions made by a tribunal of
an international organization where they can have the dominant
influence, unencumbered by any congress, parliament, or other
elected officials that might have to care what ordinary citizens
think. The WTO is their creature, and it has been pretty
consistent in taking the side of business against the rights of
citizens and the larger community. The dispute over
hormone-treated beef is another round of the ongoing fight to
assert these rights. It won't be the last. Mark Weisbrot is
research director at the Preamble Center in Washington.
This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 08/04/99.
----------------------------------------------------
2. Chefs cast a skeptical eye on altered food
By Alison Arnett, Globe Staff, 08/04/99
Our food and exactly what's in it is shaping up to be the burning
issue of the next millennium. And chefs, the come-from-behind
superstars of the end of this one, are poised to be our gurus. The
storm clouds have been gathering for most of this decade, ever
since scientists devised a tomato with a longer shelf life, called
it Flavr Savr, and put it on the market. It flopped, but the
battle lines, as muddled as in real warfare, began to be drawn. On
one side, there is science and industry; on the other, the skeptics
who worry about bioengineered vegetables, grains, and even fish.
Now the United States and the European Union are locked in a fight
over altered foods that threatens to explode into an international
trade war. Meanwhile, scientists for Monsanto and other big seed
and food companies are genetically engineering corn, soybeans, and
other products. Some milk producers inject cows with a growth
hormone to increase production. Genes from one species of fish are
being spliced with other species to counteract cold water and speed
production.
Chefs, led by such young lions as Stan Frankenthaler, owner of
Salamander in Cambridge, are stepping up, scrutinizing the
rush,questioning the results.
''What I feed my customers, my friends, my family is definitely
important to me,'' says Frankenthaler, who is the vice chairman of
the national Chefs Collaborative 2000. The collaborative, an
initiative of Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, seeks to
promote sustainable cuisine and to encourage eating local and
seasonal products. To Frankenthaler and Rick Bayless, chef-owner
of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago and the
collaborative's chairman, it makes perfect sense for restaurateurs
to be as concerned with what's in food as with how to be creative
and make money from serving it.
''We buy a lot of food,'' says Bayless, and biogenetic engineering
''is definitely going to affect our food supply.'' He adds:
''Chefs are becoming more articulate and more savvy. I don't know
all the scientific things, but I can choose whether or not to serve
my customers genetically altered food. Right now, there are a lot
of questions floating around that we don't have answers for.''
The past decade has seen an upsurge not only in fine dining but in
listing the sources of food. Even at fairly modest restaurants,
menus now are likely to tout the farms where the green beans were
raised, give the provenance of the beef, reveal the source of the
strawberries. Chefs have proudly proclaimed relationships with
small growers and farmers, many of them organic, and made it a
selling point of their food. Their concern about biogenetics is a
natural outgrowth.
''I'm bothered by the idea that I don't know the origins of
ingredients in my food,''says Frankenthaler. By working with
farmers in season, knowing his suppliers, and using as many organic
products as he can, Frankenthaler feels he's fairly knowledgeable
about origins. But some ingredients, such as soy oil used in
frying, would cost three times as much as nonorganic, he says.
''Customers are only willing to bear so much,''he says, adding with
a smile, ''It would be difficult to get customers to pay $38 for
chicken.'' He buys organic flour, eggs, and canned tomatoes, plus
milk produced without growth hormones. The milk issue crystallized
his views early in the '90s.
''I became more deeply aware, because of the controversy around the
bovine growth hormone, of the seriousness of science being involved
in the foodstream.'' Milk - and whether it is affected by the
hormone called rBST, used to increase production - has created
stronger comment, Frankenthaler thinks, because ''it struck home.
Milk is nurturing; it's what you give children. It's supposed to
come straight from the cow'' without tampering. Both Frankenthaler
and Bayless emphasize that the Chefs Collaborative is not saying
that genetic engineering is inherently bad for the food supply.
After all, as Frankenthaler says, farmers have crossed seeds and
manipulated agriculture for centuries, but ''within the laws of
nature.'' Now scientists are able to do amazing things, Bayless
says, but some in the agricultural industry and the federal Food
and Drug Administration are taking the position that the public
should not be worried unless there's proof of damage. Because corn
and soybeans, so far the most likely crops to have been genetically
altered, are in many processed foods, consumers aren't likely to
know or be able to make decisions. On the milk issue, in contrast,
there was enough outcry that supermarkets began refusing to stock
milk containing rBST.
''Let's just put some brakes on all of this,'' says Bayless. His
question: ''Do we want the companies like Monsanto'' making these
decisions for us?
''We want labeling, so that people can make their own decisions,''
he adds. And the recent case of monarch butterflies dying after
feeding on the pollen of genetically altered corn was a wakeup
call, he says, indicating that the seed companies hadn't thought
through all the possible results. The question of labeling is
under review by the US Department of Agriculture. Agriculture
Secretary Dan Glickman has said he is reconsidering the labeling
issue after the outcry over bovine growth hormones in milk. And
the monarch butterfly incident has caused more discussion among the
science and industry components.
One restaurateur who has chosen to take the purist's approach is
Nora Pouillon, owner of the elegant Nora and Asia Nora in
Washington, D.C. A national organic commission recently certified
her restaurants 95 percent organic, with ingredients ranging from
vegetables, milk,cheeses, and meats to items such as salt from
Brittany and spices.
''I've been in business 20 years,'' Pouillon says, ''and so it's
maybe more economical for me,'' because of rents and long
associations with organic suppliers. ''I wouldn't do it any other
way,'' she says, adding that one person on her staff is employed
only to source organic products. Why chefs, one might ask.
''The answer is, chefs have always been authority figures about
food,'' says K. Dun Gifford, whose Oldways organization spawned the
collaborative, ''but only in the last decade have they been taken
seriously. We pay a lot of money to go eat their food. If food is
dangerous, they care deeply.''
As for the premise that the issue is important only to an elite
group of chefs and those who pay more for organic products, Gifford
angrily replies:
''The people who speak that way about the public are really the
snobs. They treat food as a subject important to only rich
people.'' Bayless brings the argument back to the consumer. He
scoffs at the idea that Americans prefer not knowing about their
food sources if that saves them money.
''The US pays less for its food than anywhere else,'' Bayless says.
''Europeans pay a lot more for food, and they won't accept''
hormones or genetic engineering. ''We're on the wrong road'' on
prices, Bayless thinks. As a nation of consumers, we need to make
sure our food is safe, rather than worrying so much about cost and
demanding giant amounts of food. And all consumers, as well as
restaurateurs, should have the right to know what's in their food,
the chefs agree.
For more information, write to Chefs Collaborative 2000, 25 First
St., Cambridge, MA 02141, or telephone 617-621-3000, or e-mail:
<oldways@tiac.net> The local chapter president is Ana Sortun, chef
of Casablanca in Harvard Square.
This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 08/04/99.
-----------------------------------------------------
3. Vitamin A derivative is added to rice
By Karen Hsu, Globe Correspondent, 08/04/99
Developing world seen as beneficiary
ST. LOUIS - A bright, yellow-tinted rice genetically engineered to
have a vitamin A derivative, with two genes from a daffodil and one
from a bacterium, may help reduce vitamin A deficiency, Swiss and
German researcher said yesterday. The problem, they said, is
particularly severe in developing countries where the major staple
food is rice. While vitamin A deficiency is virtually unheard of
in the United States and other industrialized countries, 1 to 3
million children die each year from a lack of the vitamin, which is
essential for proper functioning of the immune system. Vitamin A
deficiency, linked to a variety of infectious diseases, is also the
leading cause of blindness in children in the developing world.
According to UNICEF, supplementation with vitamin A is estimated to
lower a child's risk of dying from several diseases by about 23
percent. More than 100 million pre-school-age children suffer from
vitamin A deficiency. After seven years of work, Ingo Potrykus of
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Institute for Plant
Sciences in Zurich, and his colleagues in Freiburg, Germany,
achieved production of beta-carotene, which converts to vitamin A
in the body, in rice grain by adding three genes to rice plants.
The results were announced at the International Botanical Congress
in St. Louis, where more than 4,000 scientists are meeting this
week to discuss the latest results of plant research. Rice plants
normally produce beta carotene, but only in the green parts of the
plant, not in the component of rice grain eaten by humans. Beta
carotene is found in dark green, leafy vegetables, and is
responsible for the yellow and orange color in fruits and
vegetables. Although the first successful beta carotene rice
grains have not gone through animal or human testing, scientists
and public health expert say they believe the results will be
''encouraging.'' Potrykus predicts that the yellow rice should be
in the hands of farmers in the next two to four years.
''If the rice is acceptable to the children, it could immediately
begin to make a difference.... This is a tremendously important
advancement and an extremely valuable tool,'' said Dr. Alfred
Sommer, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public
Health, who led the research that linked vitamin A to higher death
rates in children. The most common sources of vitamin A are meat,
eggs, and dairy products - foods that are too expensive or
unavailable to most people in developing countries. Following
environmental and food safety tests, the new varieties of rice are
expected to be distributed free of charge by the Philippines-based
International Rice Research Institute and various agricultural
research centers in developing countries. Local rice growers,
using traditional breeding techniques, will transfer the
characteristics of the beta-carotene rice into varieties adapted to
local conditions. To battle vitamin A deficiency, UNICEF gives out
vitamin A capsules when parents bring their children for
immunizations. In addition, some countries have fortified staple
ingredients with vitamin A. In Latin America, sugar has been
fortified, and in the Philippines, wheat is fortified with vitamin
A. But since the results are only proven in the laboratory at this
point, UNICEF does not plan to change its focus on supplementation
and fortification, a UNICEF official said.
But Potrykus' results may force UNICEF to further look into a
broader issue: genetically engineered food in general, which has
provoked a lot of controversy in Europe and some in the United
States. Most genetically altered products are benefiting farmers
in the developed world, helping them increase yield, but the
practice has not trickled down to developing nations. Schultink
said that UNICEF currently does not have an official stand on
genetically altered food.
On the horizon, said Potrykus, is genetically modified rice with
twice the amount of iron. Iron deficiency anemia, the most common
nutritional disorder in the world, affects nearly 2 billion people,
impairs immunity, and reduces people's mental and physical
capabilities. Between 40 and 50 percent of children under 5 in
developing countries are iron deficient. To double the iron
content in the rice, researchers added a ferritin gene derived from
a French bean. Ferritin is an iron storage protein found in many
animals and plants.
This story ran on page A4 of the Boston Globe on 08/04/99.
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