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

The European Parliament agreed to support a ban on trading bluefin Wednesday despite fears by nations like Greece, Spain, and Malta, whose fisherman would be most affected. This decision comes ahead of the next meeting in March of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)–a treaty between 175 governments that protects around 33,000 species to varying degrees–and is a significant step towards adding the bluefin to the treaty. The ban proposed by the European Parliament would allow domestic fishing, covering only the international trade of bluefin tuna. [UPDATE below]

Michael Sutton, Vice President of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has been monitoring the species, has observed its dramatic decline in recent decades. He praised Europe for bringing attention to the decline of the bluefin. “If we have the fortitude to give this species a break, it will mean more jobs, more profits, and a healthier ecosystem,” he said.

Sutton believes that the President’s Council on Environmental Quality will have to take a position on this issue in the coming weeks, ahead of CITES, despite [potential] disagreement between the Department of the Interior, which is taking sides with industry, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which came out in support of the bluefin trade ban, and adding bluefin to CITES, in October. [UPDATE: the Department of Interior supports listing the bluefin tuna with CITES. While NOAA came out in support in October, they are being pressured by the fisheries to agree that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) has acted responsibly since then, leaving out the need for the CITES listing. The question remains whether the administration will step in before there is disagreement between the two and make a strong statement.]

“I like to say that bluefin is the ‘Porsche’ of the fishing industry,” he said, referring to the fact that one bluefin tuna can fetch up to $100,000 in Japan, where 80% of this specific species of tuna is eaten. “Because of that there is bound to be controversy…[But] driving the fish to extinction is not good for livelihoods in the long term.”

Indeed, the Japanese are the most opposed to the trading ban on bluefin, as the source of one of their most prized foods–toro sashimi–is imported mostly from the Mediterranean. Adding to the issue, as seen in the documentary film on overfishing that looked specifically at the plight of the bluefin, The End of the Line, the company Mitsubishi has been hoarding tuna waiting for just such an opportunity to control the market.

The U.S. fishing of bluefin is largely confined to the Northeast coast, and represents 2% of the total world catch. Therefore, it could be argued that most of the damage to the bluefin population is happening in the Mediterranean. However, were the US to act decisively on this issue, it would bolster the issue at CITES, and support a species that is well on its way towards extinction. “At this point, we’re asking the Administration to join the world community and signal its unqualified support for CITES action,” said Sutton. “Only a trade ban would relieve the immediate pressure on the species and serve as a powerful incentive for the Atlantic Tunas Commission to prepare and implement a recovery plan.”

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.