Issues > May 1999 (#67) > The New Food Pyramid: How Corporations Squash Regulation

The New Food Pyramid: How Corporations Squash Regulation

The old saying "you are what you eat" takes on a deeper resonance when you realize how much a corporate-influenced political process taints each bite. Food and agribusiness corporations contributed more than $71 million to federal congressional campaigns in the United States between 1989 and 1998, reports Common Cause. This largesse buys everything from increased access to elected officials to tax breaks, corporate welfare and weak regulations, says Claire Goldstein, the organization's associate director of campaign finance monitoring.

Here's how corporations are hijacking food regulation.

Lobbying for Pesticides

According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures, annual U.S. pesticide sales surpass $11 billion. To help protect this big business from regulation, chemical and agricultural interests joined alcohol and tobacco companies and supermarket associations in the 230-member Food Chain Coalition. The Coalition showered Congress with $84.7 million between 1987 and 1996, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) reports in its 1998 study, Unreasonable Risk. The investments have paid off: Between 1988 and 1995, not one of the more than 65 bills introduced to strengthen pesticide regulations passed.

Monsanto, DuPont, Dow AgroSciences and 32 other pesticide manufacturers have also formed a lobbying group, Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, or RISE, which "spent more than $15 million in 1996 to employ 219 Washington lobbyists," CPI reports. Seventy-two of the lobbyists had worked on Capitol Hill, in the Executive Branch or for the White House directly. And the implementation of the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was weakened by presidential hopeful Al Gore, at the urging of a key House Democrat beholden to the pesticide industry.

Gore's intervention was the last act in a chain of legislative juggling. First came a movement to enforce the Delaney Clause, a statute prohibiting carcinogens in processed foods from the 1958 Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act. In 1995, after the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the state of California successfully sued EPA for failure to enforce Delaney, EPA required carcinogenic pesticides used on food crops to be taken off the market within five years. As this meant phasing out more than 80 pesticides, industry decided that Delaney had to go.

The FQPA of 1996 was passed to replace Delaney. The new law started out as a pro-industry bill, but some strong public health provisions were added. It required that pesticide tolerances be safe for children and infants, as well as testing for hormone disruption.

FQPA Gets Gored

When EPA began to implement the FQPA, the pesticide industry prompted about 50 members of Congress to complain to the Agency that its proposed actions were not what Congress had intended, says Carol Stangel, a spokesperson with EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs. That year, CPI reports, Food Chain Coalition members, including pesticide companies, spent more than $65 million to lobby Congress.

The pesticide industry's most potent ally, however, turned out to be Vice President Gore, who was told by Representatives Charles Stenholm (D-TX) and Marion Berry (D-AR) that he would lose key agricultural states in a presidential race if FQPA were to be fully implemented. Stenholm, the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, had received more than $121,000 in campaign contributions from Food Chain Coalition member companies between 1987 and 1996. In April 1998, Gore ordered EPA to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and allow more input from industry. As a result, a 50-member Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee (TRAC) was formed to review FQPA pesticide tolerance levels.

Gore effectively stopped the FQPA in its tracks, says Environmental Working Group (EWG) policy analyst Todd Hettenbach. EWG, one of the public advocacy groups on TRAC, resigned in October 1998, expressing frustration that the committee was being used as a delaying tactic. On April 27, 1999, all of the other public interest groups resigned in protest of what they termed government "inaction and caving-in to pressure from the pesticide industry and agribusiness." Resignees included NRDC, Consumers Union, Pesticide Education Center, World Wildlife Fund, Farmworker Justice Fund, National Campaign for Pesticide Policy Reform, and the C.A.T.A. Farmworker Support Committee.

The American Crop Protection Association, Monsanto, Novartis and Dow AgroSciences remain on the TRAC. Erik Olsen, an attorney at NRDC, says "the pesticide industry and agribusiness lobbyists in Congress have hijacked this process."

Biotechnology's Revolving Doors

In spite of polls showing that most people want food containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled, the biotech industry refuses to do so. Libby Mikesell, communications director with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), says the industry opposes mandatory labeling because genetically engineered food would be stigmatized, since "requiring a label implies a health or safety concern." And the U.S. government agrees, maintaining a no-labeling position except when genes from common allergens, such as peanuts, are inserted into a food.

The politics behind this decision illustrate the revolving door between government officials and the industry they are supposed to regulate. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration's (FDA) no-labeling policy was written by Michael Taylor, a lawyer who represented Monsanto, a BIO member, at the corporate law firm King and Spalding from 1981 to 1991. In July 1991, Taylor became a deputy commissioner for policy at the FDA. After FDA approved Monsanto's rBGH, the controversial hormone that enhances milk production, Taylor moved to USDA as director of food safety. He's now back at Monsanto as head of public policy in Washington.

Concern about Taylor's and two other FDA scientists' ties to Monsanto prompted a report by the Government Accounting Office. "While the GAO found no conflicting financial interest, there is little doubt that [Taylor and the others] had close ties to Monsanto," says Anthony Pollina, former aide to Representative Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who requested the investigation. "The report even found that FDA supervisors didn't understand the distinction between FDA duties and outside duties," Pollina adds.

Another camouflaged industry insider is Carol Tucker Foreman, head of the Safe Food Coalition and an assistant secretary of agriculture in the Carter Administration who became one of Washington's most influential food lobbyists. Foreman has defended the fat substitute Olestra and worked to ease the way for FDA approval of rBGH. "Foreman calls herself a public interest activist, when in fact she has been a corporate lobbyist with incredibly deep Democratic party connections, working for Bristol Myers Squibb, Monsanto, and Procter & Gamble," says John Stauber, co-editor of PR Watch.

The U.S. as Biotech's Hired Gun

In February 1999, the biotech industry's political clout defeated the Biosafety Protocol, a proposed agreement to regulate global trade in GMOs. The European Union, Japan, Ethiopia and other developing nations proposed that biotech companies identify and do assessments of GMO exports, with possible labeling and environmental liability requirements.

A December letter to Al Gore from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) and the Community Nutrition Institute warned of "the widespread impression that the function of the U.S. government...has been reduced to that of a brutish lobbyist for corporate interests." An accompanying letter signed by 84 organizations in 22 countries pointed out that "The campaign to enlist U.S. support to weaken the Protocol is being organized by the U.S. Council for International Business and includes a number of industries, lobbying groups and other associations."

Signatories to an anti-Protocol letter to President Clinton included BIO, Grocery Manufacturers of America and the American Crop Protection Association, which are Food Chain Coalition members. Not surprisingly, the U.S and a handful of other grain exporters opposed the Protocol, preventing the required consensus for its passage. "The U.S. and Canada spoke for the global industry coalition," says IATP's Kristin Dawkins, who attended the Protocol meetings in Colombia.

Let Them Eat ... E.coli

Instead of attempting to stop food contamination at the farm and factory, the food industry sees the solution in ionized radiation, which kills disease-causing bacteria by exposing it to nuclear waste products.

Meanwhile, in the last decade the food industry succeeded in killing every single bill promising meaningful safety reform. During that time, members of Congress received more than $41 million in campaign contributions from the food industry alone, CPI reports in Safety First. Some of those who scored the most are current Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman; Trent Lott (R-MS) and Tom Daschle (D-SD), Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, respectively; and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-MO). Two food safety bills died in the Senate Agriculture Committee, whose members, along with those in the House Agriculture Committee, received more than a third of food industry contributions, according to CPI.

In 1995, Representative James Walsh (R-NY) attached an amendment, written by a National Meat Association lobbyist, to one subcommittee report. The amendment changed the direction of USDA plans to modernize meat and poultry inspections and required USDA to allow input from the industry. This resulted in the new voluntary inspection system called Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points (HACCP) -- or what many USDA inspectors have dubbed "Have A Cup of Coffee and Pray." Walsh received more than $61,000 from the food industry from 1987 to 1996.

The food and agriculture industry's latest gambit is S.746, a Senate bill introduced March 25, 1999 that "would strip away the little power FDA and USDA now have to protect the public against food threats," says Maura Kealey, a public health advocate with Public Citizen's Congress Watch.

Attacking Organics

At first glance, the evolution of the National Organic Standards looks like a victory for the average consumer. While USDA's first draft rule would have allowed GMOs, ionized radiation, and municipal sludge in organic production, the agency backed off after receiving 280,000 protesting public comments in the spring of 1998. However, Michael Sligh, former chairman of the National Organic Standards Board, warns that the U.S. government and industry feel threatened by the existence of organic alternatives to biotechnology and pesticides. BIO spokesperson Libby Mikesell, for one, expects GMOs to be considered for organic status in the future.

If not watered down in the proposed standards, organic could vanish by attrition. As seed companies are swallowed up by biotech multinationals, transgenic seeds may become the only ones produced. If organic farmers can't get non-GMO seeds, consumers will have no other choice, says Fred Kirschenmann, an organic farmer and president of the third-party certifier Farm Verified Organic. He adds, "I'm cynical enough to believe that's exactly the strategy of Monsanto and others who are working on this." The others include DuPont, whose merger this spring with Pioneer Hi-Bred splits most of the U.S. seed industry between DuPont and Monsanto.

Then there's the industry-backed disinformation campaign against organic. Its most vocal crusader, Dennis Avery, author of Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic, broadcasts the message that organic food is lethal and environmentally damaging, and that only pesticides and genetic engineering can deliver a safe and abundant food supply. According to the New York Times, Avery is financed by agribusiness. Still, he's respectfully cited as an expert in the media.

When it comes to educating the public about pesticides, the EPA has done little better than Avery in its new supermarket brochure on pesticides published under the FQPA. Downplaying the health risks of pesticide residues on food, as well as the organic alternative, the brochure is "a propaganda piece for the food industry," says Jeannine Kenney of Consumers Union.

The government and the conventional food industry insist the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world. But no amount of political lobbying and disinformation can cover up the risks of pesticides, the uncertainties of biotechnology, or what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control now characterize as an epidemic of food poisoning. For these, consumers can thank lobbyists, dirty money and revolving doors.

--Karen Charman is a New York-based investigative reporter--