Food safety and infectious disease experts on both continents are cautioning lawmakers, consumers, and industry that a similar scenario could unfold anywhere.

“Could this happen here? You bet,” said Food Politics author and New York University professor Marion Nestle, on her Web site Food Politics Monday.

David Acheson, former associate commissioner of foods at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, now a consultant to the food industry, agrees. He says the devastation in Europe “serves as a strong reminder to those of us in the United States that we are always one step away from a major food safety crisis.”

“As we look on from the outside at the outbreak in the European Union (EU), it is natural to wonder if this could happen in the United States,” Acheson wrote in a blog post for Leavitt Partners, a consulting firm founded by Mike Leavitt, who served as Secretary of Health and Human Services under the Bush administration. “I have very little doubt that it could, and so we should not lose this opportunity to learn more lessons about food safety.”

“The most important lesson is to focus on building systems that prevent such a situation occurring here in the U.S,” explains Acheson. He believes broad mitigation strategies to prevent all forms of E. coli from contaminating food products are the most critical.

“One one has to look for a multifaceted approach that includes controls throughout the supply chain from farms, during processing (of meat, fresh produce or other higher risk items like raw milk) and during handling of food at home,” he adds.

Both Acheson and Nestle stressed budgetary concerns as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) moves to implement the most ambitious update to the food regulatory system since the early 20th century.

“If ever there was a time to give the FDA more resources, now is it,” added Nestle in her post, which was also published on The Atlantic online. “The FDA now has the authority to impose standard food safety procedures on food producers and to require safety measures for the foods we import. But Congress wants to cut the agency’s budget, and badly.”

The House Appropriations Committee recently advanced an appropriations bill that would give the agency $87 million less food safety in Fiscal Year 2012 than FY 2011.

“In the current climate of reduced federal funding, it should be made very clear to Congress that our food safety system in the US cannot afford to be undermined through lack of resources,” said Acheson.  “A request to Congress is not to cut funding, but rather to ensure efficient use of current and future much needed funding.”

A version of this story first appeared on Food Safety News

One of the many downsides to genetically engineered food is the fact that modified genes are patented by the companies that isolate them. This is not typically part of the story that gets much attention when you read about all those great (but nonexistent) magic seeds that will grow faster, better, cheaper, etc. and seem to forever remain “just around the corner.”

As any music or movie lover knows from experience, patent and copyright law in this country is a mess. You only need to look at the music industry’s successful campaign to sue random consumers over file-sharing to know that. Fun fact: no fiction copyright granted after 1929 — whether a movie, television show, or book — will ever be allowed to expire because that was the year of Mickey Mouse’s “birth” and Disney has convinced Congress that Mickey should never fall into the public domain. That’s one screwed up way to go about protecting the interests of authors. And forget about the folks over at the U.S. Patent Office — it’s clear that they have no idea what they’re doing anymore.

In my recent Common Ground cover story on GMOs, I referred to the fact that the federal government “insists the food revolution will be genetically modified.” Well, what biotech companies want more than anything is for the food revolution to be patented. Why is that? Because, unlike pharmaceuticals, patented genes will never go “generic” after some number of years. Monsanto and its biotech buddies can keep milking that transgenetic cow for decade after decade.

GMO crops have another interesting quality — you can “use” a patented gene without even knowing it. When you download and share music and movies on peer-to-peer networks or plagiarize blog posts or books, let’s face it — you know what you’re doing. But if you’re a farmer, GMO seeds can literally blow in to your fields on the breeze or just the pollen from GMO crops can blow in (or buzz in via bees) and contaminate your organic or “conventional” fields. And if that happens, Monsanto or Syngenta or Bayer CropLife maintain the right to sue you as if you had illegally bought their seed and knowingly planted it.

In an appropriately Orwellian twist, the companies even call such accidental contamination by their products “patent infringement.” And, in the face of a government more than willing to allow companies to “defend” their “intellectual property” in this way, organic farmers and others have now stepped up and said, in short, “Hell no!”:

The case, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, was filed in federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Naomi Buchwald.  Plaintiffs in the suit represent a broad array of family farmers, small businesses and organizations from within the organic agriculture community who are increasingly threatened by genetically modified seed contamination despite using their best efforts to avoid it.  The plaintiff organizations have over 270,000 members, including thousands of certified organic family farmers.

“This case asks whether Monsanto has the right to sue organic farmers for patent infringement if Monsanto’s transgenic seed should land on their property,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s Executive Director and Lecturer of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement, so we had to act to protect the interests of our clients.”

If the suit is successful, not only will it limit Monsanto’s ability to sue farmers, the company will have far greater responsibility for how and where its biotech seeds are planted. The regulatory free ride will be over. While that won’t eliminate GMO crops, it will at least give organic farmers a hope of avoiding contamination.

What I find intriguing about this suit is that it comes on the heels of a set of rulings against biotech companies and in favor of organic farmers. As I have speculated before, courts have decided that the interests of organic and other non-GMO farmers are now significant enough to require protection. While the USDA and the White House seem happy to do Monsanto’s bidding (as they did in recent decisions to allow Roundup Ready beets and alfalfa), the federal courts — and even the Supreme Court – do not seem so quick to dismiss the economic harm that might come to unfettered use of GMO seeds. This one, my friends, bears watching.

Originally published on Grist

If you eat beef, or take milk and sugar in your coffee (and even if you don’t), here is why you should care: The move could put organic foods at risk for contamination and make it more expensive.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has attempted to stave off further litigation and quell the mounting antagonism between farmers growing GM seed and organic farmers by proposing “co-existence” between the two.

Part of Vilsack’s plan for co-existence includes using buffers between organic and GM fields and even placing geographic restrictions on the growth of GM seeds. This is the first time such a discussion had been broached by the USDA. New York University professor and food movement leader Marion Nestle called the move a “breakthrough,” and we also ran an op-ed pushing for co-existence as the lesser of two evils here on Civil Eats.

But Vilsack’s co-existence plan seemed to put President Obama’s pro-business agenda at risk. In fact, David Axelrod put the kibosh on the idea with a bad pun, encouraging “everyone to ‘plow forward’ on a plan for genetically produced alfalfa,” according to Maureen Dowd.

Monsanto, the company behind 95 percent of GM sugarbeet seed and all of the GM alfalfa seed, had fought against the deal behind closed doors.

Worries were expressed about our biotech credibility abroad should we discuss any fallibility at home. But in a nod toward co-existence, Monsanto spokesman Tom Helscher told the AP on Monday, “Since the advent of biotech crops, both biotech and organic production have flourished. We have no reason to think that will not continue to be the case.” What Monsanto execs don’t mention publicly is that co-existence is not possible, and as patent holders to the gene traits in their GM seeds, they have the right to sue farmers whose fields become contaminated by these traits.

“Certainly, on a commercial-scale crop, over time, you are going to get contamination,” said Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The provisions [in the EIS] will certainly reduce contamination, and they may delay it to some extent, but they’re not going to prevent it.”

Aside from the transfer of genetic material through pollen, there are many other ways in which it has proven impossible to contain the risk of contamination. And unfortunately, there are plenty of real examples in which contamination has already happened.

There are well-documented cases with papaya in Hawaii, corn in Mexico, canola most recently in North Dakota, and creeping bentgrass, which pollinated grasses 13 miles away in Oregon. A test plot of a GM rice was even responsible for contaminating long grain varieties in five states in 2006, five years after Bayer CropScience had abandoned trials of its LL601 rice, costing the industry $2 billion.

In 1999, a corn variety called StarLink–which was not approved for human consumption–contaminated half of the Iowa corn harvest. Whether batches of corn meant for animal consumption were mixed with corn for human consumption on accident or through cross-pollination–we will never know exactly what happened. What we do know is that our current regulatory process has significant–in many cases, insurmountable–problems, and the concept of co-existence is merely a smoke screen that will create more of the same.

This is why deregulation has huge implications for organic farmers as well as consumers. The USDA does not test for contamination after deregulating a biotech crop. In the StarLink case, it was a non-profit group that found traces of the corn in taco shells. This means that the impetus will be on organic farmers to test their own crops, further increasing food prices. Worse, organic food could become more limited in availability if contamination becomes a widespread issue.

“Today, there are many committed consumers who want to know their farmer, feed their families wholesome dairy products, and be assured that their food isn’t contaminated by GMOs,” said Albert Straus, an organic dairy farmer from California who has spoken out against GM alfalfa. “If the organic feed supply for dairy cattle is contaminated with GMOs, farmers will no longer be able to offer truly organic milk to consumers, and everything we have worked to build will be compromised.” Straus Family Creamery has been voluntarily testing its feed for GMOs since 2006, and carries the Non-GMO Project Seal on its label.

In addition, organic farmers fear economic loses in export markets–places like the European Union and Japan, where products containing traces of GM foods are consistently rejected. In addition to risks in the field, it is not uncommon for organic crops to be transported in rail cars, on boats and in truck beds where GM or conventional crops have also been transported. This means that a crop that has been tested by the farmer can still be contaminated later. With no protections in place, the organic farmer bears the majority of the risk.

The reason Japanese and EU consumers are driving the purity tests on crops coming from America is simple: When GM foods are sold in places like the EU or Japan, they are labeled as such. And this really is the critical issue. American consumers want to know what they are eating, but the industry doesn’t want to be forthcoming because letting the market decide would mean resistance to GM foods.

“We don’t challenge consumers on whether they want a red car or a blue car,” said Gurian-Sherman. “But when it comes to choosing what they want to eat, the people that are supporting this technology seem to be greatly offended that the market in Europe and other places is doing what markets are suppose to do.”

Letting the market decide would also mean more support for organics, which would force the USDA to protect that market–and thus our food supply–more conscientiously. Therefore, pushing for transparent labeling on food containing GMOs could be the first step in protecting our food supply from genetic contamination.

This will not be the last battle fought to preserve an agricultural product from contamination. In fact, any day now the FDA will be issuing a ruling about the first genetically altered animal–the GM salmon.

Meanwhile, here are a few things you can do to defend organic against the threat of GM food.

From the article:

Biotech crop supporters say there is a wealth of evidence that the crops on the market are safe, but critics argue that after only 14 years of commercialized GMOs, it is still unclear whether or not the technology has long-term adverse effects.

Whatever the point of view on the crops themselves, there are many people on both sides of the debate who say that the current U.S. regulatory apparatus is ill-equipped to adequately address the concerns. Indeed, many experts say the U.S. government does more to promote global acceptance of biotech crops than to protect the public from possible harmful consequences.

Gillam goes on to describe the crux of this regulatory failure:

A common complaint is that the U.S. government conducts no independent testing of these biotech crops before they are approved, and does little to track their consequences after.

The developers of these crop technologies, including Monsanto and its chief rival DuPont, tightly curtail independent scientists from conducting their own studies. Because the companies patent their genetic alterations, outsiders are barred from testing the biotech seeds without company approvals.

Unlike several other countries, including France, Japan and Germany, the United States has never passed a law for regulating genetically modified crop technologies. Rather, the government has tried to incorporate regulation into laws already in existence before biotech crops were developed.

The result is a system that treats a genetically modified fish as a drug subject to Federal Drug Administration oversight, and a herbicide-tolerant corn seed as a potential “pest” that needs to be regulated by USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) before its sale to farmers.

This curtailment hasn’t stopped USDA researcher Robert Kremer, who has found possible detrimental effects of glyphosate (aka Roundup) on root systems and soil microbes. From the article:

…[Kremer] has spent the last several years studying soil and plant growth tests that appear to show ravaged root systems in biotech “Roundup Ready” plants.

The crops have been subjected to glyphosate applications and on the surface appear to be impervious to the weed-killing treatments as the genetic alteration allows. But the roots seem to tell a different story.

“This is supposed to be a wonderful tool for the farmer … but in many situations it may actually be a detriment,” Kremer said. “We have glyphosate released into the soil which appears to be affecting root growth and root-associated microbes. We need to understand what is the long-term trend here,” he said.

Kremer’s findings highlight why independent, unbiased research is so important: what we don’t know might hurt us.

On April 27th, the US Supreme Court will hear a case in which Monsanto is appealing a District Court judge’s ruling that requires the USDA to prepare an environmental impact statement on GM alfalfa. This will be the first case heard in the Supreme Court dealing with biotech crops. (Justice Clarence Thomas once worked as an attorney for Monsanto, but has not indicated that he will recuse himself). Should the court rule against Monsanto, it could set a precedent for stricter oversight before GM crops are put on the market. The USDA, meanwhile, has completed its environmental impact statement, but has yet to release the final version.

Some other interesting things from this report: Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, Roger Beachy, Director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — all proponents of GMO technology –  go on the record for tighter regulations. Fedoroff, a crop biologist by training, said “We preach to the world about science-based regulations but really our regulations on crop biotechnology are not yet science-based.”

Another interesting thing worth noting in this report is that when the US State Department is first mentioned, it is followed by this descriptive clause: “which promotes GMO adoption overseas.” This is the first time I’ve seen this task of the US State Department so clearly laid out in print, though from the rhetoric used by Clinton, Federoff and USAID head Rajiv Shah, it is an obvious truth. In fact, promoting GMOs abroad seems to be the standard operating procedure for the government these days. The Global Food Security Act in the Senate, for example, effectively earmarks a chunk of its $7.7 billion dollar funding pot  in biotech giveaways. More than one hundred groups have already signed onto a letter [pdf] opposing this controversial language in the bill.

The problem remains: Without thorough research, and so many questions left unanswered about GM crops, should we really be promoting them with such fervor abroad?

In other words, the European authorities seem to be throwing up their hands, acknowledging the impossibility of avoiding contamination of the various types of grains being shipped around the world in containers that are never cleaned in between routes. Bryan Endres, an agriculture law professor at the University of Illinois, had this to say in an article in the New York Times on Monday:

It’s a real concern to the industry because once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s hard to put it back in. Once these [GMO crops] are in the commodity system, it’s hard to resegregate them out.

This also confirms the concerns of anti-GMO activists, who see contamination as a major reason to keep GMOs out of the food system altogether. Contamination results when varieties cross-pollinate as well as when the seeds of GM and traditional varieties get processed together, and is difficult to avoid in a globalized food system. Such contamination might result in future generations having no choice but to eat GM food — thus the reason organic food producers have gotten together to do their own testing and labeling, in an attempt to maintain consumer trust and grow their market share.

But instead of just letting grain into Europe that is contaminated with less that one percent of these varieties, European authorities have given the go-ahead to importing shiploads of MON 88017, MON 89034 and a variety of Pioneer Hi-Bred, which are free to become feedstock or to be processed and sold to eaters in food products. Letting such a large amount of GM corn into Europe is only a small step away from seeds of the new strains getting accidentally or purposefully planted, which is currently still illegal. (MON 810 is the only corn variety legal to plant in European soil).

Jerry Mander, writes in The Fatal Harvest Reader (2002) that “biotechnology introduces a tremendous new danger: biological pollution, a hazard on scale with nuclear power. Accidental cross-pollination of biotech plants with non-biotech ones could potentially create new, uncontrollable varieties. …Unlike ordinary pollution, genetic pollution might never be stopped. It is madness to take the risk.”

A good example of just this kind of contamination came after the introduction of Starlink variety corn. Starlink had been approved for animal feed but not for human consumption due to studies that had shown the potential for allergic reactions. When it was found in taco shells in 2000, it led to a recall of over 300 corn products already on store shelves, and cost the maker, Aventis,  $150 million to clean up — though some was discovered in a shipment of food aid to Bolivia in 2002. Claire Hope Cummings, in her book Uncertain Peril (2008), writes this about the biological pollution problem Starlink caused us to consider:

Starlink has taught us a lot about contamination. For one thing, it was planted on less than one half of 1 percent of all the acreage planted to corn in the United States, but it got into the entire corn supply. The reason is that our industrial food system constantly mixes grains during processing and shipping, making it impossible to keep unwanted organisms under control. Another interesting aspect of this story is that this contamination was not detected by industry or government. They have no mechanisms in place, and no motivation, to check for GMO contamination. It was found by consumer activists, who later revealed that Aventis and the seed companies that sold Starlink did not make sure that farmers took special precautions with this product that would keep it separate.

The Europeans have had a longstanding backlash against biotech food — which has come as a result of anti-imperialistic feelings against US-based biotechnology companies, a food culture that values variety and isn’t so technologically focused, and a distrust of regulators that we have not similarly manifested in the US, even in light of so many recent food safety recalls. The biotech industry meanwhile counters that the fears of the public are irrational and un-scientific; as they continue to lobby European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), make false claims about sustainability in their advertising, and let their seeds contaminate the rest of the food supply all in the name of their bottom line, not public safety.

For now, there are many other varieties of GMOs that have not been given the okay for import from the European Commission. This will continue to cause contaminated shipments to get turned around at EU ports. But this first move could be a sign of things to come, should European citizens decide not to organize against the decision. You can bet your sweet bippy that we will keep following this story as it develops.

In his weekly address Saturday, President Obama announced that he had put together a “Food Safety Working Group,” whose focus will include fostering communication between federal agencies in order to make sure food safety policies are being enforced, starting with “closing loopholes” that have up to now allowed sick downer cows to make their way into the food system.  The goal, he said, is to ensure that the food we eat — including Sasha’s peanut butter sandwiches — are safe from contamination.

But while the Peanut Corporation of America recall is perhaps one of the largest and most dramatic recalls in our country’s history, the story is not a new one: its part of the continuing saga of food safety SNAFUs in the U.S. I would argue result from the use of band-aids in the food system instead of addressing the root causes of contamination.

According to the New York Times article covering the President’s address on Saturday, around 76 million people take ill after eating contaminated food annually in the U.S., while hundreds of thousands are hospitalized and about 5,000 die.  That is 1/4th of our entire population off work, in bed, recovering from a contaminated meal.

The discussion of MRSA seems an apt segue.  Today, Nicholas Kristof penned his second column this week in the New York Times focusing on the upswing in MRSA in humans, which seems to be stemming from the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agribusiness pig feed. MRSA is an infection caused by a “superbug,” a bacteria that has developed a resistance to all the drugs we have tried to throw at it.  Pigs seem to be incubating MRSA: research from the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry the bug. (Naomi Starkman reported on the correlation between MRSA and pigs on Civil Eats in January) And as Kristof wrote in his first column on pathogens at factory farms Wednesday, it was hardly a coincidence that around fifty of the inhabitants of a small Indiana town (population 500) near large pig operation facilities were coming down with MRSA — an infection that kills 18,000 annually, more people than die in the U.S. from AIDS.

Unfortunately, beyond being given growth hormones, livestock are kept alive in crowded and unsanitary conditions by being preemptively given a number of drugs in their feed. Without the drugs, the animals would probably die before they made it to your plate.  Therefore, the drugs are effectively shielding a larger problem in the food system: factory farms are too big to produce adequate, safe food.

To understand the sheer amount of drugged animals there are in this country, Kristof’s article states that in North Carolina alone, more antibiotics were given to animals than were administered to every person in the United States in that same period. The bottom line is that overexposure to antibiotics means antibiotic resistance — and Kristof points out that The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared this a “public health crisis.” It has been proven that land fertilized with the manure of drugged animals has resulted in concentrations of antibiotics in vegetables, so is it so hard to imagine the myriad ways eating the antibiotic-doused livestock could be directly affecting our health over time?

Kristof’s column challenges the new administration to take these issues seriously:

“So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.”

For food policy advocates, the Food Safety Working Group is cause for a huge sigh of relief.  It appears that food safety was the way to get the public’s attention on the issues facing our food system all along, as its plays right into our inherent ability to respond to fear. Everywhere you look these days the talk is e. coli, salmonella and now MRSA contamination via pigs.  As a result, people are reading labels and questioning the food supply more than ever before.

But the battle for Obama, Vilsack and the Food Safety Working Group will be hard-fought.  Already, the pork lobby is holed up in meeting rooms trying to spin Kristof’s beast of a story.  The good news is that food advocates are not backing down on the pathogens-as-harbinger-of-a-broken-food-system story. U.S. Congresswoman from New York Louise Slaughter plans to reintroduce a bill in the House to ban nontherapeutic use of antibiotics this week.  And on Monday, HBO will air “Death on a Factory Farm,” a documentary exposing the realities of the way animals are treated in massive confinement operations, beamed straight into American living rooms.  Another documentary, Food, Inc., will debut in June — and while it successfully breaks down the problems our food system faces on the whole, food safety is a huge part of that discussion.  A factory producing so-called fixes like ammonia-laced meat filler is shown as the processors’ answer to contaminant-free meat. Another portion of the film features a mother seeking to change food safety laws beginning after the death of her two-year-old son from an e. coli infection following the ingestion of a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.

It is high time we change a system that is not working — the evidence keeps mounting that tweaking the system as it stands will never be enough to ensure eaters are safe; we must fundamentally alter how we bring food to our plate.  As David Murphy wrote on Civil Eats last week, “food safety cannot be cloned, genetically modified, implanted with an electronic chip, medicated or irradiated into being.”  There is no easy answer, but I hope President Obama will stay true to his commitment to bring the heads of federal agencies together, and honestly work to strengthen food safety in America.  We must reconsider — and rethink — the model of farming that has enabled us to produce the cheap food that is making us sick.  The American public is ready, willing, and asking for this change.

Photo: Gretchen Rolland

For months, I’d been planning to see the French television documentary The World According to Monsanto (Le Monde selon Monsanto, also to be released in spring 2009 in book form), made for the French-German network Arte by the journalist Marie-Monique Robin, which premiered in France March 11, 2008.  Having plenty of reasons to despise Monsanto (Agent Orange, PCBs, global food domination) I thought that this film would only confirm what I knew about the giant agribusiness firm, which controls between 70%-100% of the GM market share for various crops.  Well, I was wrong.  There was more to fear, and seeing it all on film made it more concrete.

Marie-Monique Robin spoke to people in government at the time GM seed was given approval and granted “substantial equivalence,” to farmers in the fields in India, Paraguay, Mexico, and Iowa, and to anyone she encountered in her research that could explain the story on rBGH, seed contamination (The part on Mexico’s corn crop contamination is particularly sad and ominous – I was left wondering whether contamination was part of Monsanto’s plan in the first place), the legacy of Agent Orange, and PCB contamination in Anniston, Alabama.  She leaves not a stone unturned in the Monsanto cabinet of curiosities.  And, folks, we should be scared, very scared about the implications of these details on the future food security in the world.  I left the film certain that Monsanto was responsible for perpetrating a slow and conscious modern holocaust, and should be no less than tried for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.  Sound extreme?  70% of food on supermarket shelves contains GM food, and scientists in government and university research programs have been fired for speaking out against treating human beings as guinea pigs, aside from all of Monsanto’s other trespasses (Wonder why you didn’t know that 70% of supermarket food contains GMOs? lobbying against labeling).

During this holiday lull, do yourself a favor and watch this film.  It is the most important and fundamental documentary about the future of our food system, and it is available to watch here, or can be bought here.  (Also, here is a great review from Truthout.org last November.)  If you are new to these facts, this movie will convert you to food security issues.  If you know all there is to know about why our food system is broken, this will reinstate your food fighter’s fervor.