In both the popular imagination and ad campaigns, honey is the epitome of a wild food. After all, bees can’t be herded and overfed like cattle, or immobilized like broiler chickens if they are to continue making the sweet substance. As reported here last year, bees are “a key to global food security” due to their critical importance in food chains worldwide. In fact, honey seems to be a bellwether of global food insecurities.

The “wild” nature of even cultivated honey is both one of its major selling points and the source of many of its problems. A Guardian article recently reported that a European Union court on September 6 ruled that honey containing traces of pollen from genetically modified (GM) corn must also be labeled as GM produce. The ruling comes as a result of beekeepers in Germany discovering traces of corn pollen from a nearby field of Monsanto corn crops. The nature of bee biology and honey production throw the current discourse surrounding globalization and its effect on the permeability of local and global boundaries in a more literal light. After all, bees can’t be herded according to national borders.

Honey and national security are an odd combination, but one of undeniable importance. Colony Collapse Disorder continues to plague hives, causing mass bee die-offs. Last year, although there were rumors that the root cause of the disorder had been found, it is still unclear how much pesticides play a role. As a result, over the last decade these bee die-offs and other environmental factors have increased the price of domestic honey and, as with so many other products, have opened the door to cheaper Chinese imports. This imported honey, however, is often tainted by antibiotics fed to the bees, heavy metals from storage containers, or adulterated with “filler” products such as barley malt and jaggery. The sale of Chinese honey in the United States has been made nearly impossible by staggeringly high tariffs.

A recent Food Safety News (FSN) investigation, however, discovered that “a third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China.” Such a thing can occur because of a number of factors–the cheaper price of Chinese honey and the lack of a legal definition of “honey” among them. Chinese manufacturers pass honey through countries such as Russia, India and Australia in order to disguise the honey’s true country of origin.

One company, True Source Honey, LLC, has taken steps to halting this process. Formed by representatives from four North American honey marketing companies and importers, Golden Heritage Foods, LLC, Burleson’s Inc., Odem International, and Dutch Gold Honey, the company works to accredit honey sources and thereby build a base of trustworthy companies. The pledge signed by accredited companies includes these three tenets, honey must be:

• Ethically sourced in a transparent and traceable manner from known beekeepers and brokers;
• Moved through the supply chain in full accordance with U.S. law and without circumvention of trade duties; and
• Carry truthful labeling as to its source, has been tested to ensure quality, and has been handled in a safe and secure manner from hive to table

However, zero North American packers, five importers, and four beekeeping companies have passed the accreditation process and are now “True Source Certified.” Of course, the American founders of True Source Honey have a vested interest in keeping cheap international competition controlled. Yet I think, in looking at True Source Honey’s web site, what is most surprising is not the comparatively few companies that have gone through its accreditation process, but rather the hundreds of news stories on the site about the company’s milestones, busts of honey launderers, meetings of big players in the honey industry about the issue.

Just this week, FSN reported that more than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for FSN. FSN reports: “The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled ‘honey.’ The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.”

In a culture plagued by food industry horror stories and bad news, why hasn’t the problem of honey laundering made more of an impact on national media outlets over the course of the past ten years?  Why have they been, with a few exceptions, relegated to local news pieces replete with honey jokes, such as one CityPages blog post that states, “Minnesota beekeepers are so buzzing mad about ‘honey laundering’ that they’re holding a press conference about it today at the State Fair.”

Perhaps one of the reasons honey laundering hasn’t received more national attention is because the problem sheds unwelcome light on so many of the problems faced by current national food security. Honey reveals how something so simple as a name (what one can legally call “honey”) unites issues of international relations, economics at both the global and domestic levels, and biology (how honey is naturally made, and what can be done to bees in order to produce more of it).

Worth considering is the fact that the U.S. often views China as an economic and social threat–while the U.S. is in the process of forging a new, deeper alliance with India. Chinese honey cannot be imported into the U.S., for example, while Indian honey still is (in fact, according to the earlier FSN report, nearly all of honey imported to the U.S. comes from India). Yet Indian honey has already been outlawed in the E.U. because of its equally high level of antibiotics.

Perhaps, as with so many other foods, people must get sick before good health takes precedence over business as usual. The honey laundering issue is not, as some have claimed, just an overreaction to competitive global market practices. It is a case study that, were the world to truly focus on it, would cause us to reconsider many aspects of how global food industries work.

Photo: LauraZimmerman

China has a reputation for producing knock-offs of luxury brands like Louis Vuitton purses and BMW cars. Add organic food and wine to the list of faux products.

In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report citing a company in southern China’s ZhongShan district for falsifying an organic food certificate and seeking to export their non-organic soybeans, buckwheat and millet as organic products. The fake certification was brought to the USDA’s attention when French organic certifying company Ecocert contacted USDA officials.

On March 24, the USDA caught another company using a fraudulent organic certificate for brown sugar in Johannesburg, South Africa. In both incidents, the USDA found no evidence that the sugar or soybeans ever made it to market. Still, they could prompt consumers to question the validity and trustworthiness of food labels, particularly for imported organic food.

“If you’re not there watching how the food is produced and processed, there is always the unknown,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a non-profit consumer advocacy organization. “We push for high standards for organics, but to make it meaningful, we need systems of enforcement.”

To police organic standards internationally, the USDA depends on accredited agents to enforce organic certificates. The USDA relies on 94 agents worldwide to certify organic food for import to the United States. Those 94 organic certifying agents are responsible for monitoring some 20,000 companies that want to sell organic products.  “The USDA is working hard with the certifiers to collaborate so they can be the eyes and ears on cases like this,” said Soo Kim, a spokesperson for the USDA.

The U.S. increasingly relies on China as a source for food products. In 2008, the U.S. imported some $5.2 billion worth of seafood and agricultural products from China compared to $800 million in 1995 according to the USDA. The USDA estimates that 60 percent of apple juice consumed in the U.S. is imported from China. Other major Chinese imports include garlic, instant coffee, dried and canned vegetables and fruit.

In 2008, Chinese manufacturers added melamine chemicals to milk products, including infant formula, so that their products could appear to have high levels of protein in laboratory tests. Six babies died and hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to the contaminated milk.

These latest bogus organic labeling scams have prompted some local food advocates in the U.S. to take a hard line against imported foods. Mark Kastel, co-founder of The Cornucopia Institute, a non-profit supporting small-scale ecological farming, believes that importing food from China and elsewhere violates the spirit of sustainability, which he defines as minimizing the distance between consumers and producers, and assuring transparency in how food is grown. Organic consumers “want to pay more and so they know more,” said Kastel. For consumers, paying a premium for organic food makes less sense when food importers are found to be falsifying organic certification.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting. Over the next several months we will regularly feature stories from students in the class.

Confident after his success with health insurance reform, President Obama exerted his executive power on Saturday by making fifteen appointments during the Senate’s recess. Among the appointments was Islam Siddiqui, who will now be serving as the Chief Agricultural Negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (I’ve written here about what that job entails).

Siddiqui had been working since 2001 as a lobbyist and then later as vice president of science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, a lobbying organization for the pesticide and biotech industries. CropLife famously sent Michelle Obama a letter trying to convince her to use pesticides on her organic garden on the White House lawn. But while that move pushed the group into the media spotlight, behind the scenes the group in which Siddiqui has had a strong hand in leading has been lobbying to weaken regulations on biotechnology, pesticides and other agriculture chemicals both in the US and abroad, including securing exemption for American farmers in a worldwide ban of the ozone-depleting chemical methyl bromide in 2006, taking part in secret discussions with the Environmental Protection Agency to be allowed to test pesticides on children, and Siddiqui personally chided the European Union for “denying food to starving people” for using the precautionary principle in the case of GMOs.

While his nomination was held up for other, partisan reasons, over 80 environmental, consumer and farm groups opposed the nomination in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee, and tens of thousands of people called their senators and signed a petition in opposition. But as President Obama ramps up his effort to increase our exports in agricultural and other products abroad (which I critiqued here), he has sought a warm body to fill this position — and I’ve suggested before, a ‘bad cop’ to balance Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s ‘good cop’ abroad.

The Pesticide Action Network North America was one of the groups opposing Siddiqui’s nomination, and Senior Scientist Marcia Ishii-Eiteman had this to say about his posting:

It is unfortunate that many of President Obama’s nominations have been held up, largely due to partisan politics. But what President Obama seriously misjudged this weekend when he appointed Siddiqui without allowing a full Senate vote is that a huge swath of the American public is outraged at the idea of putting a former pesticide lobbyist in charge of US agricultural trade.

When 90,000 people petition their public servants (which is what Senators and the President are, after all) to say that a nomination is unacceptable, and that these revolving door appointments have to stop, and the President proceeds anyhow, what I see is a dereliction of duty. Expediency trumping democracy is how we end up with industry lobbyists running the regulatory agencies in the first place.

The forces protesting Siddiqui are not fringe, are growing, and will prove more powerful than I think President Obama wants to acknowledge. This March over 100 groups —including family farmers and farmworkers, anti-hunger, faith-based, sustainable agriculture, consumer and environmental groups across the country —wrote their Senators a second time, reiterating their opposition to this appointment in no uncertain terms.

During his confirmation hearing, Siddiqui attempted to appease public criticism, claiming that he would include the views of both organic and conventional agriculture—but we know from his tenure at USDA that Siddiqui’s vision of organic farming includes use of toxic sludge, GMOs and irradiation.

Siddiqui also pledged to recuse himself for two years from taking part in decisions directly affecting his former employer. But this so-called “ethics pledge” does nothing to assure the American public that Siddiqui will value and protect the interests, health and livelihoods of family farmers, farmworkers, rural communities and urban consumers, over the interests of large multinational agribusinesses. Just about everything Siddiqui has said indicates his ongoing support for what is widely viewed as a failed model of agriculture that has led to dumping cheap and unhealthy agricultural products on consumers, polluting our air and water, and preventing small-scale and family farmers from being able to make a decent living.

What it comes down to is this: Both Siddiqui and Congress now face a well-informed and outraged citizenry as well as an unprecedented mobilization of public interest groups. The American public will be closely monitoring Siddiqui at his new job, and evaluating whether his actions will truly benefit small-scale family farmers in the US and abroad, workers, consumers and the environment—or whether they will benefit large corporations such as Monsanto, JPS, Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands.

Siddiqui’s posting is a serious setback for those hoping for “fair trade” and for those who believed that President Obama had sustainable agriculture on his agenda. This Chief Agricultural Negotiator means business as usual.

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.”

The message was one of hope, the words of a newly elected President echoing the Populism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the promise of John F. Kennedy.  It stopped there, the delivery of the promise fell short.

We have gotten a New Deal, albeit one that is more protective of those who caused the economic and agricultural crises than of those who suffer from them.  We have also gotten a new version of  “The Best and the Brightest” in the Obama Administration and their faulty counsel extends beyond war into food and trade policy.

The campaign promises were not worth the notepads they are written on. The promises were broken and business at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will carry on much as it did during the Bush Administration.

Instead of going outside the agribusiness and agrochemical industries, Obama has kept the revolving door spinning and appointed the very lobbyists and special interests he said would find no home in his administration.

Monsanto stalwarts Michael Taylor, special assistant to the FDA Commissioner for food safety and Roger Beachy, head of National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Rajiv Shah, head of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) where his pro-biotech leanings will continue to be pushed on the developing world. Perhaps it is a good fit, as  President Obama noted “The mission of USAID is to advance America’s interests by strengthening our relationships abroad.”  However, advancing America’s interests and giving real aid to those in need are not the same thing. Advancing interests implies control and empire building.

Islam Siddiqui, Chief Agriculture Negotiator, office of U.S. Trade Representative, is a particularly troubling nomination. He is no friend of consumers, considering his most recent employment at CropLife America (CLA), the pesticide industries main trade association. As a registered lobbyist and vice president of regulatory affairs, Siddiqui was responsible for setting and selling  CLA’s international and domestic agenda which, simply put, was to weaken regulations on pesticides and agricultural chemicals worldwide.

He is no friend of farmers either, and not just organic farmers, even though he has a  long history of distaste for organic agriculture. He promotes agribusiness, chemical companies, processors and grain marketers who make their profits by buying low, processing and selling high. In his world, a farmers job is to maintain corporate profits.

As an unabashed ‘free trader” he is a strong supporter of the World Trade Organization and its ability to strong-arm countries into accepting unwanted U.S. imports. He openly derided the European Union’s rejection of hormone-treated beef, Japan’s desire to mandate labeling of Genetically Modified (GM) food and he pushed to permit pesticide testing on children. In his world consumers should be forced to accept whatever food products are thrown at them.

Forced trade, telling countries they must accept our products whether they want them or not is not trade, it is nothing short of blackmail.

His “public service”  career has been dedicated to selling more pesticides and GM seed to farmers world-wide and easing restrictions on their use. The beneficiaries of these policies were not farmers or consumers but the agribusiness corporations that Siddiqui worked for. That is not public service, that is promoting private interest.

Siddiqui has not worked in the best interests of farmers or consumers, rather he has consistently promoted the interests of multi-national corporations, grain companies, meat processors and chemical companies over those of the farmer or consumer. If appointed, why should we believe that that the leopard will suddenly be changing its spots ?

President Obama noted as a candidate “We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s [USDA] not the Department of Agribusiness. We’re going to put the peoples interests ahead of the special interests.” Just another empty promise.

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.

Obama has tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center (Monsanto’s nonprofit arm) as chief of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Created by the 2008 Farm Bill, NIFA is the new means of awarding the USDA’s external research dollars. As the director of NIFA (a nomination that doesn’t require congressional approval), Beachy will oversee the distribution of nearly $500 million in grants and other research funding. Sustainable agriculture initiatives are likely to suffer, as research dollars are awarded to projects that promote Beachy’s vested interests in biotechnology.

Islam Siddiqui, currently the VP of Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife USA, was nominated to the post of Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative’s office. Why the president would nominate someone from the group that infamously chided the First Lady for refusing to use pesticides on the White House garden is a bit of a mystery, but perhaps it has something to do with all the money and work as a fundraiser that Siddiqui put into Obama’s campaign. This critical position is designed to use free trade agreements to open up foreign markets for U.S. agriculture goods—mostly to promote chemical-intensive, genetically modified products that undermine local food cultures in developing countries.

It’s crucial that the Senate Finance Committee hears from public witnesses while investigating his past roles. At CropLife International, Siddiqui led an initiative to weaken restrictions against fertilizers and pesticides, as part of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of negotiations. He also served as the senior agricultural trade adviser during the Clinton administration, and pressed for getting genetically modified crops and seeds approved for commercial use in the United States.

Now the United States will continue its efforts to export the worst aspects of U.S. agriculture to other countries, many of which are deeply wary of genetically modified seeds and the impacts of toxic pesticides on their communities. Mirroring those concerns, a landmark comprehensive United Nations and World Bank- sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) has said that one of the best ways to feed the world is to increase investments in agro-ecological science and farming.

We don’t need more genetically modified seeds. What we need is enforcement of antitrust laws to break up monopoly control of the global food system, and fairer—not “freer”—trade arrangements to overcome poverty and hunger around the world.

The Obama administration has made tremendous strides towards encouraging the growth of the local food movement, and its connections to human health and ecological impacts. The White House organic garden and the farmers market spearheaded by Michelle Obama are important symbolic gestures, as is the USDA’s new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative. However, these latest appointments of industry insiders to two of the most influential offices that will shape U.S. food and agricultural policy at home and abroad call into question just how committed the Obama administration is to promoting sustainable agriculture and reducing hunger in the developing world.

We must also question how prepared the president is to break with past administrations’ track record of coddling special interests.