By Wylie Harris
Touchstone Magazine, vol. 13( 4): 25-28.
December 2003
Buying groceries this week, I chose organic milk as usual. Along with a growing number of consumers in the U.S. and around the world, I figure that the extra dollar or so per gallon is worth the knowledge that no pesticides, antibiotics, or growth hormones will find their way from the cows’ bodies into mine. But this time, a new label on the carton caught my eye – a small circle, the top half white and the bottom half black, bearing the words, “USDA Organic.” That little label, authorized just over a year ago, is the tip of a 12-year iceberg of regulatory brawling between consumers and agribusiness corporations to set the official government definition of "organic."
Like any such compromise, this one failed to satisfy almost everyone. "Organic" is a word, like "natural" or "freedom," whose intuitive meaning seems perfectly obvious, yet for which a clear definition can prove devilishly elusive. The United States Department of Agriculture's organic standards have clarity in spades. They prohibit the use of antibiotics, hormones, and synthetic fertilizers, along with irradiated and genetically modified products. Most synthetic pesticides are also proscribed. No animal byproducts may be used as animal feed, and all livestock must have access to the outdoors. But where this clear definition departs from the common-sense notion, the consumer is likely to be left in the dark, and food industry corporations are adept at exploiting that gap.
No sooner were the organic standards authorized than the devil popped up in the details – or rather, in the henhouse. The USDA currently faces a lawsuit for its ruling that one Massachusetts egg producer qualifies to use the organic label. The company's chickens have "access to the outdoors" only via small porches on the sides of its henhouses – which hold thousands of birds. Meanwhile, U.S. Representative Nathan Deal (R-GA) tried to attach a rider to this year's spending bill that would allow organic chicken producers to switch to conventional feed if it were at least twice as cheap as the organic kind. The Senate managed to remove the rider, but only at the cost of another compromise. Seafood caught in the wild must now bear the organic label – even though they may contain levels of mercury so high that the FDA recommends that children and pregnant women avoid them. [1]
Organic certification isn't the only food label that merits closer scrutiny. Juliet’s rose may have smelled as sweet by any other name, but where food labels are concerned, the rule of the day is let the buyer beware. This is no coincidence. Rather, it is a direct outcome of corporate manipulation of food label regulations to maximize profit at the expense of consumer rights and food safety.
Hormone-free milk, negative free speech: A dairy double standard
The USDA organic label is a fairly reliable umbrella guarantee that the food bearing it was produced without genetic engineering, irradiation, or antibiotics. With non-organic foods, though, any or all of these technologies may be used. At the supermarket, there's simply no way to tell, and what consumers believe about the food they're buying may be far from the truth. Though an estimated 80 % of processed food on supermarket shelves in this country contains genetically modified ingredients, only 26 % of people in the U.S. think they've ever eaten GM food. [2] Food industry corporations agitate ceaselessly to keep this wool firmly over their customers' eyes. Foods sterilized with radiation were formerly required to be labeled as "treated with radiation," but last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began permitting the phrase "cold pasteurization" as a substitute. [3] This past May, the USDA lifted a ban on irradiated meat in the national school lunch program. [4] These industry-driven label purges passed fairly quietly, in contrast to the furor over synthetic hormones in milk.
In 1993, the FDA approved the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) for use in milk intended for human consumption. [5,6] rBGH, developed and marketed by Monsanto under the name POSILAC®, is a genetically-engineered growth hormone that increases milk production in dairy cattle. [6,7] Despite the FDA's official sanction, questions about the safety of rBGH persist. Among these are the possibility of increased rates of mastitis in cattle, and elevated incidence of prostate and breast cancers in humans. [5,8] Such concerns have prompted laws requiring the labeling of dairy products containing rBGH in several countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and the 15 member countries of the European Union. [9,10] Likewise, the United Nations' food security organization, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, has declined to endorse rBGH. [11]
Echoing this consumer-safety stance, Vermont heralded POSILAC's 1994 entry into U.S. markets by passing a law, stricter than the federal standard, requiring milk producers who used rBGH to place a label advertising that fact on their products. The text of these labels read, "THE PRODUCTS IN THIS CASE CONTAIN OR MAY CONTAIN MILK FROM rBST TREATED COWS. The United States Food and Drug Administration has determined that there is no significant difference between milk from treated and untreated cows. It is the law of Vermont that products made from the milk of rBST-treated cows be labeled to help consumers make informed shopping decisions." A group of dairy corporations promptly sued the state of Vermont, supported by an amicus brief from Monsanto. Their suit claimed that the law violated the corporations' right to "negative free speech" – that is, the right not to speak. The U.S. Federal Court of Appeals decided in favor of the plaintiffs, asserting in effect that the corporations' right to negative free speech outweighed consumers' right to full information about their food purchases. [6,12,13]
This year, Monsanto itself sued Oakhurst Dairy of Maine for using labels stating, "Our Farmers' Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones." While this statement is technically true, Monsanto's suit claims that the label constitutes unfair business practice, misleading consumers by implying that milk from rBGH-treated cows is somehow less healthy. While Monsanto's case seems doomed – the federal appeals court will almost undoubtedly rule that Oakhurst's right to truthful product labeling is protected under the First Amendment – it is a clear illustration of corporate agribusiness' hypocrisy. While food industry companies adopt the air of upright corporate citizens in resisting mandatory labeling laws' infringements of their "negative" free speech rights, they wield their full and formidable resources to eliminate organic producers' rights to free speech and consumers' rights to product information. [6,14]
Invisible hands: Undue corporate influence over the food supply
Corporate resistance to informative food labels is stubbornly out of step with both consumer demand and the right to know. U.S. consumers overwhelmingly favor labeling laws allowing them to make informed choices about the food they buy and eat. In one recent poll, 94 % of respondents said that GM food should be labeled. [2] Moreover, consumers are willing to back that preference up with their pocketbooks. One recent study found that consumers in the U.S. are willing to pay as much as 50 % more for non-GM foods. [15]
In a free and open marketplace, such strong signals should push food suppliers away from GM products. However, the food industry – in the U.S. as well as globally – is so highly concentrated that this does not occur. The handful of companies that dominate food markets attempt to limit the information available to the consumer – a monopolistic business practice in direct opposition to free-market principles. Vertical integration within the food industry further magnifies these corporations' leverage, allowing them to shape markets rather than conform to them. End sales of food to the consumer are only one – relatively minor – source of profit in the whole chain of production, packaging, transport, and wholesale and retail sales [16,17].
The regulatory environment in the U.S. is ripe for exploitation by food industry giants. Regulation of biotechnology in this country is the responsibility of three separate federal agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the USDA, and the FDA. Although each agency's area of oversight is legislatively delineated, gray areas abound in practice. Moreover, the current regulatory framework for food labeling is neither mandatory nor transparent, creating abundant loopholes for corporations to exploit. [10,18-20] In addition to force-feeding genetically modified foods to blindfolded consumers in the U.S., food industry corporations exert strong influence on agricultural trade negotiations with overseas trading partners. Due in part to such influence, the European Union voted in October to require that foods containing at least 0.9 % GM ingredients be labeled and traced. Although these regulations are restrictive compared to those in the U.S., they actually open the door to a reversal of the E.U.'s five-year outright moratorium on GM food products. [21]
Even when food-labeling regulations somehow make their way through this institutional obstacle course and into the Federal Register, food industry corporations immediately begin searching for ways to circumvent them. Among the provisions of the 2002 Farm Bill was a country-of-origin labeling (COOL) program for meats, fruits, and vegetables. [22] This was a regulation long sought by independent producers within the U.S. – a net importer of beef – who often saw their market share and profit margins eroded by cheap agribusiness imports. [23,24] Food industry lobbyists fought passage of the provision, and hedged their bets in the meantime by loading it with exemptions. These included chicken, processed foods, food served in restaurants, and products made from a mixture of food. This means that if you buy bacon you'll see a COOL label on the package - but not if it's smoked, since smoking counts as processing. Similarly, oranges, but not orange juice, and greens, but not salad mixes, would bear COOL labels. [25] As soon as the Farm Bill passed, the food industry promptly set about the COOL program. During the brief review of the 200-page rule, White House, USDA, and Office of Management and Budget officials met only with opponents of COOL. A list of stakeholders represented at these meetings reads like a who's who of corporate agribusiness. ConAgra Foods, for instance, is the nation's second largest food processor (behind Phillip Morris), producing and selling beef, pork, and chicken under such familiar brands as Armour, Peter Pan, and Hunt's. In addition to dominating U.S. grain milling, Cargill, Inc., is in the top four of both turkey producers and pork packers. Tyson Foods, the nation's largest producer of chicken broilers, and Kraft Foods, the top dairy producer (and a Philip Morris subsidiary), are also on the list. [16,23,26] Farm and consumer groups supportive of COOL were completely excluded from the meetings. This industry-dominated review used the most restrictive possible conditions to estimate the cost of implementing COOL. The estimate was far higher than others produced by independent evaluators, including the government's own General Accounting Office. [22,27] A pair of senators wrote a letter to the president in response to the lopsided review process, questioning whether opponents of COOL were colluding with the administration to undermine the rule before it was even implemented. [28]
How to write your own food labels
While these various instances of food-labeling controversies may seem unrelated, they are actually linked episodes in an ongoing and concerted effort by the corporate food industry to reshape global food markets in its own favor. Though it might not matter much to you personally whether there's GM corn in your tortilla chips, this corporate agenda has more profound consequences. It undermines free market principles of consumer choice and information, and perverts the First Amendment right to free speech to protect corporations at the expense of human wellbeing. Given the degree of corporate influence over domestic and international policy, the odds for change may seem hopeless. However, some of the most important actions you can take are as simple and accessible as your own grocery shopping. By making your food purchases as local as possible, you create two-way, personal interactions that maximize your own control over the nature of the food you eat, in a way that is impossible in a corporate food system. Farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, and organic food co-ops are on the rise nationwide. Your support of these and other local-food initiatives fosters not only your own health, but that of local people, communities, and economies everywhere.
Notes
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/oira/0581/meetings/266.html