Trust Us, We're Experts PA by Sheldon Rampton

Author:Sheldon Rampton [Rampton, Sheldon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Tarcher
Published: 2002-01-14T06:00:00+00:00

Regulatory Underkill

Government regulatory agencies are supposed to provide an important check on otherwise unrestrained corporate power. With respect to the planting of genetically modified crops, however, the U.S. government has done just about everything except help drive the tractor. The biotech industry excels in the fine art of cultivating Washington politicians. “Monsanto, which makes large donations to both the Democratic and Republican parties and to congressional legislators on food-safety committees, has become a virtual retirement home for members of the Clinton Administration,” observed the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Trade and environmental protection administrators and other Clinton appointees have left to take up lucrative positions on Monsanto’s board, while Monsanto and other biotech executives pass through the same revolving door to take up positions in the administration and its regulatory bodies.” Mickey Kantor, the chairman of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and a former U.S. chief trade negotiator, now sits on Monsanto’s board of directors.

“No foods in history have been subjected to as much scrutiny in advance by the federal government as those improved through biotechnology,” claims Michael J. Phillips, who himself created controversy when he left his position as director of a National Academy of Sciences panel that was reviewing the safety of GM foods to become executive director of the industry’s main lobby group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization. In reality, not only are biotech foods exempt from special health safety testing and labeling, testing for their environmental safety is equally lax. It is up to the USDA to ensure that genetically modified crops are ecologically safe. In 1999, however, the New York Times reported that the agency has not rejected a single application for a biotech crop and that many scientists say “the department has relied on unsupported claims and shoddy studies by the seed companies.”56

Far from being antagonists, government agencies and the biotech companies they regulate often appear to be a club of elite insiders, accustomed to having their way and suspicious of “outsiders” (i.e., the general public) who try to influence or question their decisions. And they have good reason to be suspicious, because their own opinion research has told them that the public’s opinion of biotech foods is sharply opposed to their own. In 1997, an opinion poll conducted by biotech giant Novartis found that 93 percent of Americans were in favor of labeling biotech foods. Other polls conducted in recent years by the USDA and Time magazine reached roughly similar conclusions. Scores of environmental, consumer, family farm, and animal welfare groups have been campaigning, litigating, protesting, publicizing, and writing letters about the issue. In 1998, when the USDA issued a proposal that would have allowed GM foods to be classified as “organic,” 275,000 people sent the agency letters opposing the proposal.

Government and industry insiders rationalize the gulf that separates them from popular opinion by dismissing citizen concerns with the usual rhetoric about the public’s ignorance. Terms such as “Luddite” and “loony” abound as the biotechnicians compete among themselves to see who can express the most contempt for the intelligence of the great unwashed masses.

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