By: John E. Peck
Executive Director, Family Farm Defenders 5/7/07
Back in early March when it was first revealed that pet food across the U.S. contained Chinese wheat and rice gluten laced with melamine, many expected the Bush White House to take swift action, recalling the deadly products and tracking down the source of the contamination for prosecution. Instead, the FDA deferred to industry and its dubious self-policing capacity. The upshot was the death nationwide of thousands of dogs and cats, and the dumping of recalled pet food into livestock rations destined for human mouths. By late April federal officials were doing a second round of damage control, contacting pork and poultry producers in nine states about melamine tainted feedstocks and culling suspected animals. Unfortunately, some livestock could not be recalled since they were already on their way to market and people’s plates. Not to worry, says the FDA, there is no scientific evidence that eating melamine is bad for humans, so no grocery recall is necessary. Consumers have now unwittingly joined their pets as subjects in a massive food safety experiment.
Melamine is a plastic coal derivative used in fertilizer manufacture that has never been tested or approved for animal or human consumption, yet – as reported in the New York Times on April 30th – there is a large underground market in China selling melamine scrap for livestock feed as a cheap “filler” replacement for urea, boosting nitrogen levels and creating the appearance of higher protein content. Of course, this is hardly the first case of an illegal byproduct getting dumped into the U.S. food system with the tacit approval of the FDA. Milk protein concentrate (MPC), which enters the U.S. as an industrial grade ingredient to make adhesives and which has never been subject to consumer safety testing or given Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) status by the FDA, is now found in hundreds of adulterated cheese products, candies, chips, nutritional drinks, and other processed junkfoods. For powerful corporations like Kraft, it is much more lucrative to import MPC from the Ukraine, New Zealand, or India to make Velveeta, Mac n’ Cheese or Singles – and hope pliant FDA officials turn a blind eye - than to pay family dairy farmers a fair price for real wholesome domestic milk.
Responsibility for this latest food scandal lies squarely with the race to the bottom that comes with runaway globalization, as well as the corrupting influence of corporate agribusiness on government oversight. The U.S. has been a food deficit nation for years now, and as trade barriers came down and imports skyrocketed, corporations raked in unprecedented profits and consumers were left in fear of the old Latin adage: caveat emptor – buyer beware. The FDA with barely 1700 inspectors checks only about 2% of all U.S. food imports, and China is now ranked number three (after Canada and Mexico) when it comes to provisioning an increasingly hungry - and vulnerable - U.S. population.
In the wake of last year's E. coli spinach outbreak and this year's melamine pet food scandal, citizens should be demanding greater transparency and public accountability from such agencies as the FDA and the USDA as a precondition for further taxpayer funding. Country of Origin Labeling (COOL), which was mandated in the last farm bill but has only been applied to seafood, should be fully implemented for ALL imported food immediately. People may not eat t-shirts, yet one can read right on the tag where it came from. Without COOL, consumers and farmers don’t even have the choice to avoid products from those countries that have proven to be dangerous “free trade” partners. Something as essential as food deserves at least as much truth in labeling as clothing and certainly more serious government regulation – not less.
John E. Peck is executive director of Family Farm Defenders, a grassroots organization based in Madison, WI that works on issues of sustainable agriculture, fair trade, consumer safety, labor rights, animal welfare, rural justice, and food sovereignty.
For more info:
FFD, P.O. Box 1772, Madison, WI 53701
tel. 608-260-0900 www.familyfarmdefenders.org
