Dangerous combination of industrial farming and globalisation

by Terry Allen

Between mid-January and the end of May, hundreds of tonnes of food — 
potentially contaminated with dioxin and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) -
- entered the United States from Europe. Some has already been eaten, some 
still sits on shelves in stores and pantries.

The problem started in January in Belgium when a small fat-rendering 
company incorporated dioxin and PCB-laced oil into its recycled fat. Eighty 
tonnes of poisoned fat were then sold to at least a dozen animal feed 
companies, most in Belgium, but at least one each in France and Holland.

Like ink dropped in a glass of water, the 1,800 tonnes of animal feed they 
manufactured spread around the world through vast corporate food chains and 
complex international trade networks.

It took Belgian officials until March — when a startlingly high number of 
chickens started mysteriously dropping dead — to discover the 
contamination. After tracing the problem to the dioxin-laced fat, the 
Government sat on the information until almost the end of May before going 
public.

By then it was far too late to contain the economic, political and public 
health disaster. Belgian farmers lost more than half a billion dollars; the 
ruling party lost the June election; and an unknown number of reproductive 
and nervous system problems and cancers were spawned.

During the four months between contamination and disclosure, livestock had 
eaten the feed, stored dioxin in their body fat, and passed it on in milk, 
eggs and meat to humans and other animals.

Some food contained almost 1,000 times the US limit for the cumulative 
poison; just one of the contaminated eggs could increase a three-year-old 
child's dioxin load by 20 per cent.

Dioxin and PCBs are dangerous toxic chemicals and potent carcinogens that 
pose a serious public health threat. It takes 20,000 times less dioxin than 
DDT to kill a person outright. But the real danger is that dioxin and PCBs 
accumulate in body fat over a lifetime and are passed on to foetuses in the 
womb and to babies through breast milk.

As the extent of the problem became apparent, Belgium recalled up to 800 
products, shut down 1,400 farms and issued directives that affected 
approximately 100,000 businesses. France identified 103 of its farms that 
could have purchased the tainted feed.

Around the world, dozens of countries acted within days to ban potentially 
contaminated meat and dairy products.

In most of Europe — and in nations as far away as Malaysia, Thailand, 
South Korea, Cyprus and New Zealand — pork, poultry and beef products, 
Belgian chocolates rich with cream centres, mayonnaise, ice cream, egg 
pastas, cookies and cakes made with butter or cream disappeared from 
stores.

European Union nations — as well as countries as far-flung as China, 
Russia, the Philippines, Jordan, Indonesia and Kenya — not only embargoed 
suspected foods, but sought out and seized items already in circulation.

The US response was marked with inconsistencies. Officials at the Centre 
for Veterinary Medicine in the USA were astonished to discover the amount 
of animal feed that was either imported from, manufactured in, or 
incorporated ingredients from Europe.

They estimated that hundreds of tonnes of potentially contaminated 
products, from kitty snacks to dairy cow starter, entered the United States 
during the four-month window and admitted they had no way to trace batches 
back to manufacturers.

But the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees meat and 
poultry, acted quickly with one of the world's stiffest bans. 

On June 4, it issued a total hold on all EU meat and poultry, even going so 
far as to ban aged ham produced well before the contamination took place.

The inconsistent US response — the broad embargo paired with an absence of 
recall or even in-country product testing — has sparked speculation about 
hidden motives.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one USDA employee acknowledged that 
public health was not the only consideration in determining policy. "There 
is the whole international trade thing, (the recent trade wars over) 
bananas, pork, beef... Any of these international issues could be coming 
into play."

In play at the time was Europe's ban on US beef and restrictions and 
labelling laws of various EU countries on genetically modified organisms.

While Americans have grown used to factory farming and centralised 
agribusiness, the concept is relatively new in Europe, which still has a 
strong tradition of small family farms and high quality, locally grown 
seasonal produce.

Since 1996, though, Europe has had a crash course in the dangers of 
industrialising food production.

That year, the European Commission banned exports of British beef after 
strong evidence emerged showing that mad cow disease could infect humans.

The brain illness in cattle — bovine spongiform encelophalopathy — was 
spread by the practice of feeding the animals ground-up remains of infected 
animals, turning the herbivores into cannibals to boost their protein 
consumption.

The next year Holland slaughtered 10 million pigs to contain an epidemic of 
contagious swine fever that had spread like wildfire through large, densely 
stocked farms.

It is no wonder that EU consumers are deeply suspicious of such US 
industrial "pharming" practices as incorporating genetically modified 
organisms into crops, routine dosing of beef cows with growth-enhancing 
hormones, and giving prophylactic antibiotics to livestock. But to the 
United States, eager to market its high-tech foods, such consumer 
resistance is a nightmare.

While Europe was still reeling from the Belgian scandal, officials met in 
Bonn on June 21 for the bi-annual EU-US summit. Though the trading blocks 
seemed to be at a standoff, the United States surprisingly gained some 
ground when European leaders agreed, as one US official noted, "to put 
science into the discussion".

After mad cow disease, repeated instances of French blood tainted with HIV 
and now the dioxin debacle, the EU was hard pressed to argue that its 
regulatory system was superior or even safe.

USDA Secretary Dan Glickman seized on the dioxin scandal as yet another 
example of Europe's failure to protect its food supply and as an 
opportunity to tout the US science-based system as the only rational 
alternative.

Basing food safety decisions on science sounds reasonable — given the 
complexity of the issues, the high stakes and the temptation by both sides 
to disguise protectionist practices as safety issues.

But it depends on what you mean by science. "Science is not an absolute 
matter", says Jan Groenveld, an agricultural counsellor with the Dutch 
embassy.

"We in Europe are more concerned about long-term effects. That we have 
found no proof of danger in the short term does not mean there are no long-
term risks."

His position illustrates one of the two competing approaches to consumer 
protection — the precautionary principle under which products that could 
cause serious or irreparable harm must be proven safe before approval.

Consumer advocates and environmentalists support this approach, arguing 
that humans should not be used as guinea pigs.

Industry and much of the US Government favour the other approach, so-called 
"science-based" decision making. They argue that it is impossible to prove 
that something is 100 per cent safe.

Therefore, given the potential benefits to humanity as well as profits to 
US industry, new products and technologies should be approved unless or 
until they can be proven dangerous.

While the Belgian dioxin scandal may have proven politically opportune for 
US policy-makers, it may have less happy consequences for consumers.

There is no way to assess the quantity of Belgian dioxin that people around 
the world consumed before the ban and after it.

The chemicals already are pervasive in the environment and the Belgian 
contaminants simply will be added to the carcinogens already stored in the 
body fat of all the world's mammals.

Indeed, far more dioxins than were in Belgium's poisoned animal feed 
routinely enter the environment, mostly from incineration plants. In some 
cases, contamination continues for years without being noticed.

The Belgian contamination, for example, might never have been uncovered if 
the feed had gone to cows and pigs. The particular dioxin involved happened 
to be deadly to chickens and a state veterinarian thought of testing for 
it.

In the end, the Belgian incident was extraordinary not for the quantity of 
dioxin involved but for the way it spread so quickly around the world. The 
combination of industrial farming and globalisation created conditions 
under which accident or misconduct by one small producer had worldwide 
political, economic and health consequences.

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