Today, science policy analysts often assume a standard narrative about the controversy over genetically engineered crops and animals intended for use in agriculture or food. It goes something like this: GE products were introduced with little notice or public protest in the United States, but Europeans took a more precautionary approach, alleging a host of environmental and food safety risks. European precautionary attitudes launched a global controversy of GE crops that, depending on one’s perspective, is a tempest in a teapot—a great deal of worry over very little actual risk—or is a signal event that has exposed grave weaknesses in the U.S. regulatory approach.

From this starting point, proponents and critics of GE crops and animals commence their mudslinging. More generally, scholars of science and technology cite this narrative as evidence of the need to conduct public consultations in advance of introducing a potentially controversial technology.

Although the standard narrative has a germ of truth, it is in two respects quite mistaken. For one thing, early GE products were subjected to significant debate in the United States, concluding with an unprecedented congressionally imposed moratorium that only expired after the completion of an equally unprecedented study conducted by the executive branch Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1992.[i] For another, the U.S. biotech industry did in fact conduct extensive public consultations between 1988 and 1995. These consultations revealed the potential sensitivity of points that eventually became deeply controversial, but they also convinced mainstream U.S. environmental organizations that issues in agricultural biotechnology were not the most important fish they had to fry.[ii]

There are many lessons that might be inferred from these correctives to the standard narrative, but in the present context the point is simply this: What everyone knows is sometimes wrong.

The first genetically engineered microbe intended for use in agriculture or food production were bacteria that had been modified to produce bovine somatotropin, a hormone secreted naturally by lactating dairy cows. The synthetic version made by GE microbes could be produced at a scale and cost that made it feasible for dairies to administer shots of the hormone in order to increase milk production, particularly in cows nearing the end of a lactation cycle. The second microbe, however, was recombinant rennet, the complex of enzymes (traditionally derived from the entrails of slaughtered calves) used to turn milk into cheese. Although recombinant bovine somatotropin was one of the most controversial technologies ever to move through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, recombinant rennet elicited not a peep of protest. It was, perhaps, unseemly to suggest that we should keep slaughtering baby calves in order to make cheese.

The silence that accompanied the introduction of recombinant rennet in the mid-1990s led some scientists to think that the hubbub over genetic engineering was already over when the first GE crops were introduced a few years later. Indeed, as implied above, regulatory actions at the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announcing the first generation of herbicide-tolerant soybeans hardly generated any protest at all from the environmental community. Pest-resistant varieties of cotton and corn that produce a toxin specific to caterpillars (bacillus thuringiensis, colloquially Bt) were also approved at the EPA with little public note.[iii] These GE crops were picked up in record time by the vast majority of U.S. farmers, but when biotechnology companies attempted to introduce them into Europe, they botched the job badly.

Soon the boomerang struck: European resistance was covered in the press and soon, GE crops were controversial everywhere. This is the part of the standard narrative that is correct, and reporter Dan Charles’s book Lords of the Harvest tells the story with aplomb. His book is still recommended reading for science buffs of all kinds.

In a political world where even the announcement of the first organism with an entirely chemically synthesized genome is already so last month, all this would seem like ancient history. Yet biotechnology continues to be a polarizing technology in agricultural and food science, and in rural America, generally. The recent NRC report “Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States” released in May will not settle the controversy. This report is remarkably thorough in documenting the way that GE crops have affected pesticide use as well as analyzing the economic fate of mainstream American farmers.

For the most part, the report characterizes these impacts in a positive light:

• Herbicide-tolerant or Bt varieties of corn, soybeans, cotton, and sugar beets have led to a reduction in both the amount and toxicity of agricultural chemical use in comparison to conventionally grown non-GE varieties of these crops.
• Use of GE crops is associated with other conservation practices such as reduced tillage, and public or worker health benefits have been observed in connection with the reduction of chemical use.
• Neither the movement of genes to wild or weedy relatives of these crops nor toxicity to nontarget species has occurred in a manner that raises concern.
• Farmers have achieved greater cost efficiencies in the production of GE crops, even after user fees for GE technology are included.
• The contracts and licenses introduced to protect companies’ intellectual property have not had an adverse economic impact on farmers.

But the report does document some negative consequences. Crops tolerant to the relatively benign glyphosate herbicides—Roundup is Monsanto’s version—have resulted in so much reliance on these chemicals that weeds are now becoming resistant. This may precipitate a switch to more environmentally harmful methods of weed control. Scientists have been more successful in forestalling insect resistance to Bt. In fact, Bt crops in particular have been responsible for reducing the unwanted effect of pesticides on species of insects such as bees or other pollinators, that not only do not damage crops, but may be beneficial.

The report is also quite candid in stating that the research needed to determine impacts on social capital and the quality of life in rural America has never been done, despite early warnings that these would be the areas in which biotechnology would pose the greatest threats to the sustainability of U.S. agriculture. Although processes of gene flow or environmental consequences have been studied with respect to impacts on native flora and fauna and with respect to ecosystem processes, they have not been studied with respect to their impact on other farmers who may be trying to grow organic or non-GE crops for the European market.

It is economically unimportant whether the commodity grades of corn and soybeans that are being used domestically are “contaminated” by pollen from neighbors’ fields. But the report notes unsubstantiated reports that farmers targeting “non-GE” markets may suffer economic losses from the effects of pollen drift. The reports are unsubstantiated because scientists at the USDA and in agricultural universities simply have not conducted the research needed to evaluate these claims. In this respect the report testifies to a gap between scientific work that gets done and scientific work that is constantly underfunded and deferred. This gap is arguably itself an “impact of genetically engineered organisms” and one of the main sources of continuing tension in rural America.

This research gap began to have real-world implications when organic growers started experiencing contamination from the GE crops being grown by their neighbors. The conflict between farmers using GE and non-GE organic growers is complex and lies at the heart of the issues that the NRC report identifies as insufficiently understood and under-researched. Organic standards prohibit the use of genetic engineering. This was a choice made by the organic growers themselves, albeit with considerable support from their customers. The big problem with GE pollen or seeds that blow across the fencerow is that they are simply not supposed to be there in an organic crop. Organic rules permit some contamination, so long as the organic certifier states that the GE pollen and seeds were not intentionally introduced, but neither growers nor buyers of organic crops are happy with this situation. The contamination problem is especially serious for those who produce organic seed. Small levels of contamination will be multiplied as the crop is grown out, and the value of an organic seed crop so contaminated can be substantially reduced.

In response to this problem, organic growers in some states lobbied for and in a few cases successfully passed local ordinances banning GE crops, generally on a countywide basis. This was, not surprisingly, resisted by those conventional farmers who wanted to grow GE crops in those counties. It was also seen as a threat by biotechnology companies and by conventional farmers in other areas who felt that their crops were being irresponsibly maligned by people who were campaigning for these ordinances. I’m sure that readers will be shocked, shocked to discover that getting voters to support such ordinances provoked statements on both sides that are not strictly true. In some states such as Michigan, statewide laws were passed to block efforts to enact these local ordinances. These fights caused bitter divisions in many rural areas, and in some cases, pitted university researchers who do work with organic growers against their colleagues who work with biotechnology.

The ante was raised even higher as a result of few legal actions taken by Monsanto, the leading biotechnology company, against farmers who stated that their crops had been contaminated by GE seed. The most celebrated case occurred in Canada, and concerned a farmer named Percy Schmeiser. Monsanto alleged that Schmeiser, who has never purchased Monsanto’s herbicide-tolerant canola seed nor signed Monsanto’s license agreement, was, in fact, growing Monsanto’s patented variety of canola, and sued him for infringement of their patent. Schmeiser claims that his fields were inadvertently contaminated. Canadian courts upheld Monsanto’s claim, holding that Monsanto’s patent was valid and that Schmeiser had intentionally violated it.[iv]

What may be more important than the facts of this case is the way that it has reinforced the view among opponents of GE that pollen drift is actually a conspiracy of the biotechnology industry to damage organic markets or even claim ownership of non-GE crops of all kinds. This view was promulgated among Mexican corn growers following the alleged discovery of transgenic maize (illegal in Mexico) in a sample collected from peasant fields near Oaxaca in 2002.[v] While this generated some controversy and a hearing of the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, a side treaty of NAFTA, the inability of either side to provide concrete evidence ultimately left the dispute unresolved.

The bitterness and distrust that has been sown in rural America over these disputes does not come through in the bland prose from the NRC report:

Anecdotal stories suggest that the crops of U.S. organic growers are being screened in the marketing chain for the presence of GE material and are being rejected if levels exceed market-determined levels. We do not have evidence to judge how widespread such testing is in the United States. This issue deserves more investigation.[vi]

The report is much more profuse (and should be strongly commended) in its presentation of evidence showing that, on balance, the impacts of GE crops have been positive when viewed from an environmental or public health perspective, at least over the short run. This evidence is especially important in light of continued allegations on the part of GE opponents that these crops are unhealthful and environmentally damaging. Schmeiser’s own website at www.percyschmeiser.com contains many links to others who make such allegations.

The report does discuss the complex economic causality that makes calculation of total impact difficult and inherently controversial. If, for example, farmers start using less of a toxic chemical, the makers of that toxic chemical may well lower the price, which may lead farmers to start using more of it. Should biotechnology be given credit for the initial decrease? Should it be blamed for the later increase? Questions like this have given those who would wrangle over “real” impact of biotechnology much fodder to chew on.

The NRC report may not silence those debates once and for all, but it does provide a very detailed analysis that should become the standard for contending parties who want to continue them. More importantly, to claim biotechnology has achieved environmental benefits involves an implicit comparison. Benefit relative to what was being done in mainstream agriculture before biotechnology is, in some respects, a very unambitious comparator. Benefit relative to what might have been accomplished had a significant fraction of the research funding that went into genetic engineering been dedicated to alternative agricultural technologies is so speculative as to be virtually meaningless.

Yet certainly some of the organic farmers who feel that the USDA and land grant universities abandoned them are thinking in just such terms. For them, it is a case of the road not taken, and that has made all the difference.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University.

[ii] Thompson, P. B. 2008. “Nano and Bio: How are they Alike? How are they Different?” in  K. David and P. B. Thompson, eds, What Can Nanotechnology Learn from Biotechnology? Social and Ethical Lessons for Nanoscience from the Debate over Agricultural Biotechnology and GMOs (Burlington, MA: Academic Press, 2008) p. 125–155.

[iii] Frederick H. Buttel, “The Environmental and Post-Environmental Politics of Genetically Modified Crops and Foods.” Environmental Politics 14 (3) (2005): 309–323.

[iv] Bruce Ziff, “Travels with my plant: Monsanto v. Schmeiser revisited.” University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal 2 (2) (2005): 493–509.

[v] Abby J. Kinchy,  “Genes out of place: Science, activism, and the politics of biotechnology.” Ph. D. thesis, (University of Wisconsin, 2007).

[vi] National Research Council. The Impact of Genetically Engineered Corps on Farm Sustainability in the United States (2010) 3–33.

Additional Reference Materials:

Charles, Dan. 2001. Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Buttel, Frederick H. 2000. “The recombinant BGH controversy in the United States: Toward a new consumption politics of food?” Agriculture and Human Values 17 (1): 5–20.

Those wishing an excruciatingly detailed overview of social and ethical issues associated with agricultural biotechnology might wish to consult:

Thompson, Paul B. 2007. Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective. 2^nd ed. Dordrecht, NL: Springer.

• “Applying science and technology strategies to drive economic recovery, job creation and economic growth”
• “Promoting innovative energy technologies”
• “Applying biomedical science and information technology to help Americans live longer, healthier lives, while reducing health care costs”
• “Assuring we have the technologies needed to protect our troops, citizens, and interests.”

These challenges focus on the knowledge flow, diffusion of information, and technology transfer required for effective application and commercialization of science and engineering advances. To exploit the competitive advantage that the United States has in basic R&D, we must make a major commitment to knowledge and technology transfer efforts, and support innovation in its fullest sense.

To be responsive, federal agencies need to prioritize a coherent strategy for knowledge transfer and application and address intermediate organizational structures that accelerate the transfer and application process. This is no easy task. Decades of focusing on research and the outputs it generates, such as journal articles, patents, and licenses, has not prepared the agencies to identify organizational structures that translate knowledge and measure impacts, such as jobs created or lives improved.

As a former research administrator in the National Science Foundation (Sociology) and at Cornell University and Washington State Universities, and as an agricultural experiment station director and then dean of agricultural, human, and natural resource sciences, I know the disciplinary mindset of research administrators as well as scientists and engineers. Within universities, we also must work to change this mindset.

Processes of knowledge translation, transfer, and communication are often unique to each agency or very specialized even within departments of each agency. Take the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its Rural Development outreach programs, the Agricultural Research Service with its technology transfer function, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture with its State Cooperative Extension programs. Coordination of strategy even within a single agency is exceedingly difficult.

One approach, however, is to strengthen the links, cooperation, and partnerships of the technology extension and outreach programs and functions of the federal government and universities around the country. USDA and state Cooperative Extension programs, the SBA Small Business Development Centers, and the Department of Commerce Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, all need more professionals co-located in communities where they meet the four challenges set by OMB and OSTP every day. As place-based organizations, they would have a distinct competitive advantage to achieving the desired outcomes.

At the same time, the federal government needs to embrace the open innovation model as a way to accelerate the technology and knowledge transfer process from idea to execution, from laboratories to businesses and consumer use. The open innovation model assumes high levels of communication, careful listening, reciprocity among the parties, mutual commitment, and serious engagement to achieve the goals. It also requires proximity, as well as virtual connectivity, to accomplish place-based programming, as Orszag points out.

Innovation and knowledge transfer have a rich history in America. An early application was the state Cooperative Extension Services, which sent county agents into agricultural areas to demonstrate new methods to farmers, their families, and communities; to listen to farmers about local problems; and to link relevant university faculty and researchers, who provided research-based solutions. The goal was to provide educational and technical assistance about agriculture, natural resources, and nutrition and consumer economics, as well as community-building skills to rural residents who could not attend the university.

A similar philosophy created the Small Business Development Centers, often co-located in universities, community colleges, or nonprofit organizations, to provide technical assistance, access to capital, coaching, and counseling to strengthen local small businesses. In North Carolina, the governor’s office recently called on our Small Business and Technology Development Center to lead a statewide job retention and growth initiative which will help the state’s existing small-to-medium-sized businesses enhance their competitiveness.

A third example reflects the commitment to manufacturing from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, called the Manufacturing Extension Program, in which nonprofit organizations and universities provide engineering outreach and technical assistance, training, and educational support to the manufacturing sector. Professionals in this program reside within local communities and support economic growth.

Each of these organizations practices the translation of expert knowledge into usable knowledge for their constituencies.

The 21^st century goals of economic development, “green” energy lifestyles, improved health and well being, and better national security do not require new extension services. Rather, they require agencies to revisit organizational mechanisms already in place, to be creative in adopting what works, to fund, and to deliver needed programs.

The Department of Energy does not need to invent an Energy Extension Service to achieve energy conservation in homes, agricultural, commercial, and industrial sectors. The adoption of new technologies, the use of energy conservation practices, and the implementation of renewable energy strategies could benefit from added investments in Cooperative Extension, Small Business Development Centers, and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to focus on these priorities. Inter-agency grants or cooperative agreements could provide funding. These well-established programs have already earned the trust of consumers, community leaders, business and industry leaders, non-profits, and governmental partners.

Universities also must reciprocate with innovative programs of their own. And they are. Witness the establishment of incubators for new startups, business accelerators, and joint venture efforts at commercializing inventions. The federal government provides much of the basic R&D money, to be sure, but universities and the private sector are now working more closely to commercialize the results.

Programs exist at many public universities to provide targeted educational programs. An example at North Carolina State University is the Small Business and Technology Development Center, which provides startups with training on “Becoming an Investor-ready Entrepreneur.” It also provides investors with a course called “The Power of Angel Investing.” Bringing these two sectors together can yield increased capital for new startups. Additionally, the SBTDC provided 48 workshops in 2009 on “Business Success in Tough Times” in which strategies for marketing, managing finances, and improved manufacturing processes are the focus.

With over 70 active startup companies and 110 commercialized products adding to the global economy, NC State, and its Centennial Campus, is among the nation’s most significant entrepreneurial universities. An example is the success of LaamScience, a startup company developing a textile coating that kills most viruses and bacteria when exposed to light. The technology, licensed from NC State University, has multiple markets—surgical and respirator masks, hospital disposables and supplies, and filters and air purifiers.

NC State’s Industrial Extension Service, which manages the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, provides training and technical assistance to increase the competitiveness of manufacturing firms, the health sector, and state agencies through Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and the International Standards Organization, or ISO certification.

These organizations, as well as others within the university, can also provide consulting services, feasibility studies, market analysis, supply chain analysis, and access to student internships.

An integrative approach might establish a research collaborative in which private companies join and annually provide funds for pre-commercial research, advise the faculty and graduate students on industry priorities, and evaluate the results at annual reviews, for example, in the NC State’s Nonwovens Cooperative Research Center.

Evaluation is also useful for feedback to companies. The evaluation of company processes and continuous improvement can lead to greater efficiencies and awards of excellence such as the Shingo Prize in North Carolina and the National Baldridge Award.

Examples of impact from the Industrial Extension Service include the North Carolina Department of Environmental and Natural Resources, which implemented lean office processes and increased the number of air quality permits processed by 52 percent, and provided them 40 percent quicker, with no added staff. Another example is the nonprofit RLCB, formerly the Raleigh Lions Club for the Blind, which showed a $4 million increase in sales, gains in productivity, and new products as a result of IES services. RCLB also added 40 jobs in one year, including a full R&D department.

Demonstrations, educational efforts, and technical assistance have a long track record of generating successful diffusion and adoption of innovations. It is the practical application of science and technology via these knowledge transfer mechanisms and partnerships that builds on research and drives economic recovery, job creation, and economic growth.

These programs deserve high priority for continued and additional funding as agencies and universities prioritize their budget requests for 2011.

James J. Zuiches is Vice Chancellor of Extension, Engagement and Economic Development at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

Many of us are Lunas when it comes to organic. That a rogue Georgia peanut plant might allow salmonella into organic snack foods from, perhaps, Chinese peanuts, probably strikes many of us as a long way from that idealistic post-Silent Spring 1960’s vision of a people-powered sustainable alternative lifestyle. (Even more so when we consider that while the source or sources of the current outbreak haven’t been nailed down, the debilitating bacteria could have come from a peanut crop that was certified organic by direction of the Chinese government and was, perhaps, grown in raw sewage—but more on that in a bit.) For better or for worse, today “organic” is part of America’s conventional food system, dependent on the same processors, distributors, and marketers as nearly everything else we eat. And so, when the American conventional food system sneezes, organics catch a cold.

Tracing the Salmonella Outbreak

The Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America, or PCA, has long been a source of ills. One peanut buyer complained to the Washington Post that PCA preyed on “distressed situations,” finding big paydays with suppliers who “had peanuts from last year that had to move.” In a November 2006 letter recently uncovered by Congress, a consultant wrote PCA CEO Stuart Parnell to explain where an outbreak of salmonella was likely coming from. “Organic Chinese peanuts were the source of the roasted, granulated peanut product,” wrote Darlene Corwart of J. Leek Associates, Inc., who didn’t respond to Science Progress’ request for comment. She went on: “[I]t seems likely that the Chinese Organic peanuts could be the source for the microbial hazards given the nature of fertilizers used on organic products.”

If your ewww sensor goes off at the mention of “the nature of fertilizers,” that’s with good reason. It’s a good bet Corwart is referring to the practice of using untreated excrement—animal and otherwise—to fertilize Chinese crops. (If I haven’t already lost you to queasiness, the Dallas Morning News has more on the practice.)

Organic: Adrift in USDA’s Backwater

But there’s a check, right? Some responsible party making sure organic stands for something? Well, it depends. Organic became a federal standard two decades ago when farmers needed something for customers to trust beyond their smiling faces; in effect, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is vouching for the conscientious farmer. But, explains Pennsylvania Certified Organic’s Emily Brown Rosen to Science Progress, housed within the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, the National Organic Program, or NOP, has never been much liked. The USDA approach to organics, say even supporters of the current system, has long been like dragging your kid brother or sister out with your friends because mom said you didn’t have a choice. “USDA didn’t start the organic process because they wanted to,” said Rosen. “They started the organic process because the organics community got a bill passed on the floor of Congress,” the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act, or OFPA. Rosen describes NOP’s status at USDA as “very sort of backwater.”

Keep talking to Rosen, and the conflict between how parents like “Luna,” growers, and the USDA all see organics jumps out. “Most people involved in organic think it is a high-quality product,” she argues, “But USDA makes a big deal out of saying that organic isn’t a food safety claim or a quality rule—it’s a marketing standard.” NOP refers to itself as “a marketing program housed within the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service.” That’s “marketing” twice, for those of you counting at home.

The Dawn of Cheap Organics

Yet while making its home in bureaucratic Siberia, the “organic” label has also morphed from community standard to a U.S.-backed magical stamp of approval, as good as currency. The organic market is, after all, booming. Sales grew from $1 billion in 199o to $20 billion in 2008, and are pegged to grow 18 percent each year for the near future. CLIF Bar—whose idea of branching out means a LUNA bar line for women—found itself caught up in the PCA recall. The other organics on the list, though, are products of far bigger businesses. Health Valley Organic Peanut Crunch Chewy Granola Bars are a product of the billion-dollar food giant Hain Celestial Group. Organic Cascade Trail Mix belongs to the discount grocery store chain WinCo. Cascadian Farms, makers of the recalled Sweet & Salty Mixed Nuts Chewy Granola Bars, is a General Mills brand. Today’s iconic organic brand is less Farmer Jane’s farm-grown apples than Anheuser-Busch Organic Wild Hops Lager.

Jim Riddle served on USDA’s National Organic Safety Board for five years. “A shopper still needs to be smart in their food choices,” Riddle advises. “You can waste your money on highly advertised and packaged and marketed products organic products just like you can waste your money on highly advertised and packaged and marketed conventional products.”

Into the Peanut Breach, China

With the growing hunger for mass-market organics, the U.S. needs China’s organic peanuts, and cheap. Take it from the Chilean American Chamber of Commerce. “With increasing popularity of organic products due to changing preferences, lower prices and the entrance Wal-Mart into the market,” AmCham Chile has told its farmers and producers, “dependence on imports will only get larger until the US organic agriculture system changes.” All this creates the (unrealistic?) expectation that organic should be easy on the wallet. “It trickles down to the budget-minded shopper,” argues Organic Consumers Association chief scientist Craig Minowa. “You go into the store and see an organic peanut butter that’s three dollars more than another organic peanut butter sitting next to it on the shelf. They go cheaper. But what they won’t do is flip over the jar and see that the peanuts were grown in China.”

PCA’s Blakely, Georgia plant was smack in the middle peanut country. (Jimmy Carter’s Plains farm is about 75 miles northeast.) But, plagued by weeds, few local peanut farmers are certified organic. Yet, admits Riddle, when it comes to outsourcing organics to China, “There are problems.” While Whole Foods may say that “organic standards in China are no different than they are in Brazil, Turkey, Thailand or anywhere else,” Riddle concedes that “not all organic is the same.”

Translating “Organic” Abroad

Still, there’s an expectation that USDA organic, even on Chinese peanuts, means something. Worth keeping in mind is the fact that USDA doesn’t actually certify any carrot or potato or apple as organic. It certifies certifiers. NOP’s tiny staff of 15 relies on third party accreditation agencies—Quality Assurance International, for example, or the Organic Crop Improvement Association, which, according to an archive of the PCA website, was the certifying authority on its troubled Georgia plant. “The certifiers realize that the more products they certify, the better it is for them,” explains Minowa. “So you might have an inspector coming in who might have a boss who says ‘you don’t need to be so anal about it.’” (The organic certifier in PCA’s Plainview, Texas, plant has since been fired by the Texas Department of Agriculture.)

Or you might have a foreign government with an unsettling food record. Consider this: with imported foods, USDA relies on certifiers working in-country, but Chinese regulations prevent foreign inspectors on Chinese farms. So, a third-party certifier like OCIA, for example, operates a local office at 8 Jiangwangmiao Street in Nanjing, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. But that office is actually run by China’s Organic Food Development Center. Which is, in fact, an arm of SEPA, or, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration. As in, your peanut butter’s organic because the Chinese government says it is.

OCIA CEO Jeff Sees defends the arrangement in an email: “Certification Decisions are not made by OFDC. All inspection reports are given to our staff in China who translate the reports and send them to our reviewers in Lincoln [Nebraska] for the determination of Organic status.”

The Fix? An Empowered USDA Organics Program, Demanding Eaters

Thanks to the 2008 Farm Bill, funding of the “backwater” National Organic Program got a small bump for fiscal year 2008, and President Obama’s FY2010 budget overview released last week pledged a boost in USDA organic funding dedicated, in part, to “maintain[ing] label credibility.” Still, the office overseeing a $20 billion industry is running today on, at most, just $2.6 million a year. A more empowered organics program at USDA could poke its fingers into more places, including in problem spots abroad like China. As the organic boom continues, concerned eaters like Luna and the rest of us have to demand that the “USDA organic” label means something real, powerful, and bankable. After all, with the American food system we have today, “organic” eaters or not, we’re all eating from the same pie.

Nancy Scola is a writer in Brooklyn, NY.

As of last week, about 500 people were known to have been seriously sickened by eating Salmonella-tainted peanut paste (and in some cases, peanut butter), all of it produced during the past few months at a single Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Georgia. What’s impressive about this outbreak is that those victims are dispersed among 43 states, and they collectively got their illnesses from having eaten one or more of 135 or so different products, all of which contained peanut paste or peanut butter from the same Peanut Corp. plant.

What a vivid example of our intensively centralized food production and distribution system! A small-town Georgia processing plant, soiled with fecal bacteria from an unknown source, sickens hundreds of consumers across the country-and probably thousands more who wrote off their bouts of diarrhea and vomiting as one of those “facts of life” and so went untallied by health authorities.

The most mundane truth behind these events is that the agencies we depend on to oversee food safety in this country are underfinanced and understaffed.

This is but the latest in a string of tainted food scandals that have gripped the nation in the past couple of years, including ones involving toxic melamine in pet food and baby formula and Salmonella in peanut butter and on sprouts, spinach, tomatoes, and peppers. What to make of it all?

The most mundane truth behind these events is that the agencies we depend on to oversee food safety in this country are underfinanced and understaffed. As documented in Change for America, the progressive blueprint recently released by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, those responsibilities fall mostly on the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration-but primarily the FDA, even though it enjoys a far smaller food-related budget than does USDA.

Years of stale budgets for the chronically cash-strapped agency have led to the departure of about 1,000 FDA scientists in the past few years, even as Congress enacted about 125 statutes that demand additional agency resources. Nearly half of the FDA’s managers and supervisors are old enough to retire within the next five years. And staffing at the agency’s Center for Food Safety has declined 20 percent over the past three years. A new food protection plan, released more than a year ago, remains unfunded.

It would be naive to believe that these realities did not contribute to the fact that, either unnoticed or undaunted by federal or state overseers, Peanut Corp. has apparently been producing Salmonella-tainted products since July 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention retrospective, still being constructed by government epidemiologists. It’s still not clear who, if anyone, was aware of that problem back then. The FDA inspected the plant last year and found failings, but details have not been disclosed. Months later Georgia state authorities inspected it again at FDA’s request. What triggered that request, and exactly what was found, is still a secret.

Beyond the fact that the nation’s food-plant inspection and follow-up process is not sufficiently aggressive, the peanut-paste outbreak has brought other shortcomings into focus.

For one, the FDA still lacks the legal authority to recall tainted foods, despite repeated calls for Congress to grant this important power. Instead FDA must cajole offending companies, and allow them to arrange such actions on their own terms, which often means slowly and one product at a time even as overwhelming evidence of trouble accumulates. Delays can matter: at least six people are so far suspected of having been killed by the bacteria in this outbreak.

Equally troubling is what the FDA and CDC have had to go through to figure out where tainted paste may have been shipped and which products it ended up in. I am on an FDA listserve that alerts subscribers every time a food is recalled, and the pace of Peanut Paste-gate has been enlightening.

On January 17th, for example, it was Kellogg recalling its peanut butter sandwich crackers and Famous Amos and Keebler Soft Batch Peanut Butter Cookies; Hy-Vee Inc. recalling its Monster and Reese’s Pieces cookies and its People Chow Party Mix and Assorted Truffle Fudge; and Perry’s Ice Cream Co. recalling its Select Peanut Butter Ice Cream. On January 18th McKee Foods recalled its Little Debbie Peanut Butter Toasty and Peanut Butter Cheese Sandwich Crackers, and South Bend Chocolate Co. recalled some of its candies. On the 19th it was Kroger Select Ice Cream Products; various ZonePerfect health and energy bars; and cookies made under the Wal-Mart, Food Lion, Lofthouse, Chuck’s, Meijer’s and Pastries Plus brands (not to mention a recall of “uneviscerated mackerel fish,” apparently unrelated, though who knows what was going on in the back rooms of that Blakely peanut processing facility?).

Day after day the news has continued to trickle out, like a bad case of the runs (egads, not the PetSmart “Great Choice” Dog Biscuits too!). The problem is that Peanut Corp. and federal and state regulators have had to shuffle through countless invoices going back many months, and each suspect company has had to confirm that information using its own (often incompatible) computer and bookkeeping system. Isn’t it time for a unified, interoperable software program for use by all FDA-regulated entities that would allow this kind of information to be called up quickly by health authorities in situations such as this? Wouldn’t that be useful if some bioterrorist were to slip a nasty bug into a distribution hub for baby carrots or hamburger patties or bottled water?

While we’re at it, might it be time to take seriously what so many expert groups (and some in Congress) have been saying for a long time, namely that food safety is too important to be a stepchild of an agency that is primarily concerned with the pharmaceutical industry? Let’s face it: The current system is nuts.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Christopher Doering of Reuters reported Tuesday that the “FDA and USDA have said it is impossible to differentiate between cloned animals, their offspring and conventionally bred animals, making it difficult to know if offspring are in the food supply.”

AP/Jason Turner

Offspring of cloned dairy cows.

In January, the FDA released a report giving two thumbs up on products from cloned cows, pigs and goats (the FDA didn’t make a recommendation on sheep because there wasn’t enough information), stating in a 968-page “final risk assessment” that food from cloned versions of these animals doesn’t pose any harmful health risks. The milk and meat from cattle was deemed safe, as well as meat from pigs and goats. The day after the FDA report was released, the USDA requested that U.S. farmers not sell food products from cloned animals, citing a need to first harmonize rules with trading partners and to build acceptance.

Consumers in many countries, including in the United States, have said they oppose food from clones or their offspring because of health and safety issues and because of concerns for the health of the clones themselves. Ethical issues are also being considered by the European Food Safety Authority, which is funded by the European Union to provide risk assessments on food. It’s their opinion that “considering the current level of suffering and health problems of surrogate dams and animal clones, the EGE has doubts as to whether cloning animals for food supply is ethically justified.”

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Rick Weiss, who was then a staff writer at the The Washington Post, reported in January the FDA doesn’t require food companies to label products containing cloned livestock. But the agency may allow other companies to label products that do not contain cloned meat or milk.

In May, Nancy Scola reported in Science Progress on the disarray of the federal food safety system. With several recent food recalls and government agencies constantly placing blame on one another, Scola wrote that the food safety system is so complicated it “verges on the absurd.”

“When we had the spinach episode, everyone acted like it was a great surprise,” former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, a Bush-appointee and long-time federal food safety official, told Scola, “But the likelihood of something bad happening [with the food supply] is always quite high.”

The number of cloned animals in the country is low—only around 600, with cattle being the majority—but offspring are unaccounted for, and the size of the second generation is unknowable, especially since a single male clone can sire countless offspring through mail-order semen sales. Indeed, clones are too expensive to slaughter for the meat market, so for most farmers the business plan is to use them to breed high-quality offspring. Alex Seitz-Wald of NewsHour Extra says one breeder in Kansas has been selling his cloned cattle’s sperm for years. According to Seitz-Ward, cattle experts believe that food products from the offspring of clones already exist in the American food supply.

AP

Executives from Hormel Foods Corporation and Cargill, Inc. testify before Congress on food safety in November 2007.

Previously, “downer” cows were deemed fit or unfit for slaughter on a case-by-case basis. But concern over the safety of the beef supply peaked earlier this year when the USDA issued the largest meat recall in history of 143 million pounds. A congressional hearing following the recall raised serious questions about both the ability of the USDA to keep food-borne pathogens out of the food supply, and the problem of overlapping jurisdiction between the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the USDA.

In this instance, oversight responsibility seems clear and it’s a good thing that the USDA is aiming to close this loophole through which E. coli, salmonella and other such nasties can slip (UPDATE: see testimony from the February hearing by Michael Greger, M.D.). But the proposed rule highlights the broader problem of trifurcated food regulation. Writing in Science Progress about “Our Fractured Food Safety System,” Nancy Scola reported recently that, “The GAO, which has long called for a single food agency, last year bumped the current system up to the level of ‘high-risk area.’” She goes on to describe internal conflicts at USDA:

Its primary role in Washington is to promote the food trade—to boost the amount of American pork the Chinese eat, not to worry over whether the pork Americans consume is safe to eat. GAO recently profiled seven countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) that have consolidated food oversight under one roof. Most interesting is the holistic farm-to-fork approach of EU member countries. Ireland is a typical case, moving its food safety agency under the auspices of its existing public health authority—in recognition of the fact that the raison d’etre of their own Department of Agriculture is promotion, not policing.

Keeping sick cows out of the food supply is a good start, but rationalizing food safety will take more than just rulemaking. The comment period on the USDA rule extends until September 29. More info here.

As a Government Accountability Office report dryly notes, an open-faced ham sandwich sold at a highway rest stop is the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and subject to daily inspections. But add a second slice of bread and it becomes the Food and Drug Administration’s job to check in on the sandwich, which it does about once every five years.

And so it goes with just about every type of food Americans consume, resulting in a food safety system that verges on the absurd. The FDA regulates chicken broth, but beef broth is under the USDA’s watchful eye—except in the case of dried soups, in which case the agencies swap duties. Responsibility for packaged baked beans depends on whether the meat in the can is pork chunks (FDA) or bacon (USDA). And under which agency’s purview a pizza falls depends on whether it is of the cheese lover, meat lover, or seafood lover variety.

The American food supply chain’s remarkable ability to assemble a coherent meal independent of the season masks stunningly uneven oversight of the production and assembly process. A single cheeseburger purchased at the “to go” window of a fast food chain off any highway in America can contain a beef patty made from a hundred heads of cattle, cheese from the milk of a dozen dairy farms, lettuce from Arizona engineered to look fresh for days on end, and tomatoes “strip-mined in Texas,” as Garrison Keillor once joked. And yet the inspection of these ingredients rests with a bureaucratic alphabet soup of agencies. Take the 2004 case involving two USDA agencies, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Food Safety and Inspection Service. At the very same time APHIS was testing the carcass of a cow infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease,” FSIS was clearing its beef to head out to market.

Food production today is a well-oiled system, as we saw in 2006 when spinach contaminated with E. coli spread quickly from California’s Salinas Valley out across the country, turning up from Oregon to West Virginia. But where the food supply is a symphony of cooperation, the federal oversight of that system is a nearly completely atonal chorus. More than a dozen different federal agencies share differing and overlapping areas of responsibilities and ways of doing business.

Plans for a single government public health body to take command have long foundered in Congress, but interest grows as the news today is filled with tales of outbreaks, from multi-million pound beef recalls to salmonella-tainted peanut butter and pot pies to melamine-laced imports from China. According to the CDC, each year in the United States an estimated 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths are tied to unsafe food.

Putting American eaters at risk is a fractured federal system overseeing what we put into our mouths—one crafted for days when Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle turned Republican Theodore Roosevelt into the nation’s leading progressive food reformer. Since the days of The Jungle, the U.S. food safety system has evolved in fits and starts. When Franklin Roosevelt sponsored the creation of the FDA in the 1930s in response to food and drug scares, much responsibility was left behind at the USDA.

Visit the food section of Recalls.gov, a joint project of a collection of federal agencies, and the problem immediately becomes clear. To go any further on the website, you must opt to click the logo of either the FDA or USDA—leaving it to eaters to know which federal agency is responsible for overseeing the safety of which foods. What’s more, recall notices on a .gov website may be misleading, given that food recalls are nearly always voluntary.

The result is a system designed to put out fires, not for ensuring food safety in line with modern science. “When we had the spinach episode, everyone acted like it was a great surprise,” former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, a Bush-appointee and long-time federal food safety official, told Science Progress. “But the likelihood of something bad happening [with the food supply] is always quite high.”

The Wrong Recipe for Federal Food Oversight

Marion Nestle, New York University professor and the author of Safe Food who has served in a number of food positions on the federal level, describes “an overlapping system with huge gaps where everybody blames everybody else.” Indeed, asked about the working relationship between FDA and USDA officials, Crawford says, they “generally don’t bump into each other. I don’t know if I ever tried to make a phone call to the USDA. And if I did, I don’t know if it would have been returned.”

The GAO, which has long called for a single food agency, last year bumped the current system up to the level of “high-risk area.”

The GAO, which has long called for a single food agency, last year bumped the current system up to the level of “high-risk area.” When it comes to the FDA, part of the problem, says Lisa Shames, GAO’s Director of Food Safety and Agriculture Issues, is “a mismatch between funding and food oversight responsibility,” where the FDA oversees four-fifths of the food supply but receives just a fifth of the total federal budget for the effort. The FY2009 presidential budget calls for increasing the Food and Drug Administration’s funding level to $662 million, a meager 7 percent boost covering little more than inflation. The FDA itself says it needs an additional $275 million to beef up its overseas inspections.

Beyond FDA’s meager budget is the challenge of having an agency with so vast and diverse a mission, one responsible for the safety of America’s food and drug supply. Says former commissioner Crawford, “I just can’t recall an incident when I said, ‘My gosh, thank God we have the drug people with the food safety people.’” Crawford discounts the possibility of finding agency-level leadership equally skilled in food science and pharmaceuticals. “They just don’t make people like that,” he says.

USDA, home to the majority of agencies with food oversight duties, is an altogether different entity with its own special challenges. In 2003, then-Secretary Ann Veneman lamented that the department was bound by laws that pre-dated the Model T. Says Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, “USDA is in the plant to look at gross morphology, basically looking for lesions. That was relevant back when the statutes were written,” in the turn-of-the-century days when Sinclair wrote of meat in Chicago’s packinghouses found to be “moldy and white, stinking and full of maggots.” But visible problems like rotting meat aren’t the modern concern, says Doyle. Today’s worry: bacterial pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella, both of which are invisible to the naked eye.

What’s more, USDA is a department internally conflicted. Its primary role in Washington is to promote the food trade—to boost the amount of American pork the Chinese eat, not to worry over whether the pork Americans consume is safe to eat. GAO recently profiled seven countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) that have consolidated food oversight under one roof. Most interesting is the holistic farm-to-fork approach of EU member countries. Ireland is a typical case, moving its food safety agency under the auspices of its existing public health authority—in recognition of the fact that the raison d’etre of their own Department of Agriculture is promotion, not policing.

Added to those challenges is that we’re now pulling an enormous amount of food into our supply stream from overseas—up to 15 percent of what we eat, by volume—and inspecting a miniscule one percent of it at most. The current regime sends a message to food producers in the wake of the melamine scare, says NYU’s Nestle. “The Chinese were very frank about it,” she explains. “’You asked us to give it to you at the cheapest prices. You didn’t say anything about quality.’” Even occasional point-of-entry inspections can act as a deterrent. Nearly non-existent inspections simply set the expectation that the fractured U.S. food supply is willing to absorb foods of dubious quality.

Calls for a Single Federal Food Safety Agency

What’s the solution? For years now, diverse voices in Washington—from GAO to the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge—have been calling for the creation of a single food safety agency, a player in the federal bureaucracy with the necessary mission, might, and budget to ensure a safe food supply. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) routinely introduce the Safe Food Act, a legislative vehicle that not only creates a Food Safety Administration but establishes a firm schedule for inspections and gives the new body the power to invoke mandatory recalls.

Interestingly, given Ridge’s past support for the idea, GAO recently eased its strong call for single agency plans in response to the rocky process of getting the Department of Homeland Security up and running. A spokesperson for Rep. DeLauro counters GAO’s concerns by arguing that the creation of DHS was a different effort entirely—an attempt at unifying offices and agencies with unique aims and cultures. She argues that the creation of a Food Safety Administration would be more akin to federal reorganizations like the 1947 establishment of the Department of Defense, which united federal agencies and offices already committed to a common mission.

Even industry opponents of current single-agency proposals, such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, are quick to say that they are united behind the common goal of ensuring a safe food supply. Reached via email, the Cattlemen’s Phyllis Marquitz objects to Durbin and DeLauro’s plans as “political solutions that rearrange agency structures but do little to show potential for real-world practical change.” But the beef industry spokesperson adds that she judges beef producers to be receptive to a convincing case that one unified federal food safety agency is indeed the best way to ensure safe food.

Former FDA Commissioner Crawford echoes the sentiment. In his experience, everyone involved in the food chain “agree[s] with the idea that we have to put safety first,” he says. “The question is how we get there.”

Of course, restructuring the way the federal government handles food safety is no easy task. Agency heads are generally loath to give up jurisdiction and budget. From deep-pocketed meat lobbyists to members of House and Senate agriculture committees, many in Washington with a role in the food supply chain have an interest in maintaining the idea that food safety is an industry issue, rather than a public health concern.

But perhaps most important is Congress’s limited supply of attention. It’s been nearly 70 years since the last time the public demand for safe food forced politicians to act. But given our globalized way of eating and the mounting reports of food-borne outbreaks, that time is likely coming again. The day has certainly arrived for Congress to consider the Safe Food Act with all the thoughtfulness that what we put in our mouths deserves.

Nancy Scola is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.