Food Safety Standards and the TTIP

Recent criticisms of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) regulatory cooperation initiative identify what critics believe to be many errors on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to food safety issues. Such divergences suggest that neither side is necessarily more cautious or less stringent than the other, and that differences in treatment reflect diverging regulatory standards rather than food safety risks. In each instance, one party permits domestically that which the other party prohibits from importation. For example, both the Center for Food Safety and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy report that the U.S. permits the treatment of poultry with chlorine. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) reports that chlorine-rinsed chicken is banned by the European Union. On the other hand, the CFS reports that the U.S. has a “zero-tolerance” policy for e. coli in cheese, while Europeans do not. While these are not the most controversial of the U.S.- EU food safety disagreements, assuming that objective, science-based food safety standards could be established for each of these types of products, there are unknown combinations of type 1 and type 2 errors across the Atlantic, in which one party erroneously treats safe products as unsafe or treats unsafe products as safe. Rather than allow these errors to stand, which potentially expose some to food safety risks and deprive others of trade benefits, a likely outcome of progress in regulatory convergence is a reduction of these errors, increased trade and a basis for agreement on risks. The critics, on the other hand, would support each of these competing barriers to trade, without regard to the harms to domestic health these food safety risks purportedly represent. “Harmonization”, in contrast, could result in the reduction of these errors and further contribute to the sharing of scientific findings in a cooperative manner for the purpose of establishing scientifically supportable food safety standards.

Just (Trade In) Food

While hardly a guide to food system development, James E. McWilliams does identify in Just Food a number of problems with the approach of “sustainable” food activists’ proposals. Locavores are the target in the subtitle (“Where Locavores Get It Wrong”), and Mc Williams has clearly hit a raw nerve. Even though he toned down his criticism of locavorism in a recent interview, a number of locavores and supporters have turned a deaf ear to McWilliams, which he might have predicted on the basis of his characterization of “going local” as becoming a “gated community.” Jill Richardson, of Lavida Locavore, suggests burying one’s head in “local” sand:

I've got a book recommendation for y'all. Only it's not a recommendation for a book to read. It's a book to NOT read: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by James McWilliams. If the title of the book intrigues you and you think it might be worth a look, don't buy the book and instead just hit your head against the wall for about 10 minutes. You'll achieve the same result as you would by reading the book, but you'll save time and money.

This book doesn't provide any logical or factual arguments so far as I can tell, although it does have facts woven into it in misleading ways. The author is excellent and building up straw men and knocking them down (i.e. he tells you his version of "what locavores say" - a false argument for eating locally - and then proves that false argument wrong).

Parke Wilde of U.S. Food Policy, will begrudgingly at least read the book, since McWilliams changed it’s subtitle:

I will certainly read it, but, from the title, I'm not really looking forward to James McWilliams' new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. In a recent radio interview, McWilliams really objected to a certain kind of strictly dogmatic 100-mile-circle type food discipline.
That seems like a true and fairly bland point. It would be good environmentalism if Americans ate food that has less processing, less meat, and comes from closer to home, on average, but that doesn't mean all food should come from right nearby.In the meanwhile, Kerry Trueman's review at Eating Liberally certainly was fun. The lead sentence describes the book as "the literary equivalent of a turd blossom, the Texan term for a flower that pops up out of a cow patty."

…

I'm just glad McWilliams relented on the originally planned subtitle for the book: "How Locavores Are Endangering The Future of Food." With that title, I would have felt free to skip the book altogether.

In concluding that “we must see our only eating choices as undeniably, inevitably global” (p. 222), and making repeated references to global food sufficiency as the weak pillar of “sustainable” food proposals, McWilliams’ only discussion of international trade is very poorly informed. He calls for an “international regulatory agency “before countries trade,” asserts that the WTO has discouraged “harmonizing regulations,” and refers to the Free Trade Area of the Americas as a “trade agreement” (pp. 206-207). Moreover, his discussion of trade distortions is largely limited to the role of agricultural subsidies (which he proposes to replace with “sustainable” food subsidies), and totally neglects non-tariff barriers such a sanitary and phytosanitary measures.

In summary, the weakness of McWilliams in this area follows from his characterization of trade as “essentially a matter of basic environmental justice” (p. 205), and his recognition of the weaknesses of locavorism, rather than any appreciation of the value of international trade in food.

Opening trade with Cuba a priority for grain industry

By Sarah Hills, 12-Dec-2008

Potential changes to US trade policy with Cuba once president-elect Barack Obama takes office would significantly boost grain markets, the USDA has said.

There has been speculation that Obama may lift a long-standing trade embargo with Cuba, and if trade were to normalize, the US has the potential to dominate this growing grain market, according to the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service.

The embargo limits American firms from conducting business with Cuba, although a relaxation of this was agreed in 2000 allowing the sale of agricultural goods.

Currently the US share of the Cuban market for agricultural imports is between 25 and 30 percent of Cuba’s total agricultural imports, USDA figures show. Exports are mainly soybeans and soybean products, corn and corn products, wheat and wheat products, rice and poultry meat.

But Rebecca Bratter, director of policy at the US Wheat Associates (USW), said that opening trade with Cuba is a policy priority for USW and the entire US wheat industry in 2009.
She said: “US wheat market share in Cuba is still well below the average 80 percent in the rest of the Caribbean.

“Easing the embargo and the gradual removal of trade barriers between the US and Cuba should translate to significant upside sales for US wheat producers.”

She added that population, market size, historical ties, shared interests, and proximity make Cuba a natural and significant market for US wheat.

Presently, US-Cuba export regulations increase the transaction costs relative to the comparable costs incurred by other exporters. These higher costs can offset, in part, the shipping advantage that the US has being in such close geographic proximity to the Cuban market.

Exports

Cuba has also consistently ranked among the top ten export markets for US soybean oil, dry peas, lentils, dry beans, rice, powdered milk, and poultry meat.

The USW said that around 500,000 MT of US wheat per year is exported to Cuba under the Trade Sanctions and Export Enhancement Reform Act (TSRA).

Bratter said: “While President-Elect Obama stated his intention to lift the embargo as part of his campaign platform, the issue was conspicuously absent from the presidential debates and final days of the campaign and left doubt about the opportunity to change the US trade relationship with Cuba.

“However, the current consensus suggests the 111th Congress will take up the issue quickly after it is seated in January.”

Cuba imports around 60 percent of its food. However, this month there were strong signals that the country is about to embark on a GM crop program to reduce its dependence on food imports.
The USW promotes US wheat and provides comprehensive assistance to US wheat buyers, millers, wheat food processors and government officials around the world.

Source: Food Navigator-USA.com

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Launches Global Food Safety Monitor

In a new e-newsletter, Global Food Safety Monitor, IATP's Steve Suppan will "cover the challenges of setting strong international food safety regulations that protect public health. In the first issue, Steve writes about the U.S.-Korea Beef dispute, attempts to reach a food safety agreement between the U.S. and China, and a U.S. dispute with the European Union over chicken exports."

In this first issues, Steve Suppan says, "We won’t neglect good news. If a new pathogen detection test shows promise, if good food safety legislation is approved or if a company does more than required by law to ensure that traded food is safe, we will endeavor to report it. We hope that the readers of this bulletin will not only respond critically to it, but send some of that good news our way."

Local and Traded Food

Reasonable people may believe that there are relative benefits to be derived from locally-produced food and from food traded over a longer distance (including internationally). Local food advocacy has become very prominent, and its views have often been expressed at the expense of traded food. While not disputing the value of local food, it appears to have acquired a very heavy ideological burden: Local food is good for (local) farmers, it is good for consumers, for the environment, for the local economy, and for overall health and nutrition. Moreover, local food is represented as being fresher (no matter how long after harvesting it is purchased), it is safer, and it tastes better. This is a lot to expect of food simply on the basis of how far away from a consumer it was grown.


On the other hand, internationally-traded food is often villified, regardless of the type of food it is, who produced it (and under what conditions), who sold it, or who prepares or eats it. Take as one example the International Society for Ecology and Culture's report on "Rethinking California's Food Economy," which states that "economic globalization is at the heart of almost every problem of the food system."


While international trade is only one component of "economic globalization," and food is only one set of products traded internationally, this is a heavy burden for international-traded food to bear. It is time to rationally re-assess and begin to re-engineer the international trade in food before we are all forced by locavores to grow our own or the industrial food giants to eat theirs.

Sustainable Food Trade Project Launched

The Houston Center for Food System Research and Development has launched a "Sustainable Food Trade Project." The Project has the goal of transforming criticisms of the "food trade" into dynamic mechanisms by which more sustainable food systems can be developed. The Houston Food Trade Policy Forum will post developments from this project and solicits comments.

Import-Export Business: How globalization is smothering U.S. fruit and vegetable farms

By Tom Philpott

Grist Magazine 30 Aug 2007

Earlier this month, President Bush roiled U.S. vegetable farmers by announcing a crackdown on undocumented workers. Last week, industrial-meat giant Smithfield Foods goosed the hog-futures market by inking a deal to export 60 million pounds of U.S.-grown pork to China. These events, unrelated though they seem, illustrate a common point: that despite all the recent fuss around local food, the globalized food system, far from losing strength, continues to gain traction.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree -- especially if no one's there to pick it.

Unwittingly or not, Bush's move puts a heavy squeeze on large-scale U.S. vegetable growers, and will likely result in more food hauled in from nations with weaker environmental regulations. Smithfield's triumph in China reflects that nation's diminishing food-production capacity -- one of the prices it has paid for its rise to global manufacturing preeminence. As more and more industrially produced food whips around the globe, the result is more pressure on soil and water resources, more greenhouse-gas emissions, and more fertile land made vulnerable to suburban sprawl. In this article and the next, I'll attempt to illuminate how global economic forces shift food production from one place to another, to the detriment of local communities and the environment alike.

Bottom of the Barrel

As U.S. fruit and vegetable farms have scaled up to meet the demands of increasingly large buyers like Wal-Mart, they've come to rely on a steady supply of low-wage and highly flexible workers, willing to toil long hours at peak seasons and make themselves scarce when not needed. Moreover, these mega-farms increasingly specialize in one or two crops, and rely heavily on poisons to keep pests and weeds away. Thus in addition to being poorly paid and monotonous, the work tends to be dangerous -- and undesirable for anyone with other options.

Not surprisingly, according to most estimates, 70 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, the great bulk of them underground refugees from the devastated rural economies of Mexico and Central America. For several seasons now, fruit and vegetable farmers have had to scramble to find enough workers to harvest their crops. One factor in the labor shortage has been an increasingly militarized border, making it more difficult for would-be workers to cross over. Another has been the building boom, which has lured undocumented workers into higher-paying construction jobs.Thus farmers in production centers like California and Arizona were already tense about the labor situation when Bush rolled out his hodgepodge of measures designed to force farmers (and other employers) to stop relying on undocumented workers. (For the record, as I've written before, I think it's schizophrenic and childish to make a big show of hunting down and deporting the people who feed you.) Farmers across the country quickly cried foul. In New York's Hudson Valley, where workers come from Mexico and Central America, apple growers fear a bumper crop could largely wither on the branches. "We have 3 billion apples to pick this fall and every single one of them has to be picked by hand," one grower told The New York Times. "It's a very labor-intensive industry, and there is no local labor supply that we can draw from, as much as we try. No one locally really wants to pick apples for six weeks in the fall."Down in Arizona -- epicenter of winter vegetable production in the U.S. -- farmers are taking a cue from their peers in Colorado and desperately hiring inmate labor. But an Arizona prison official acknowledged to The Christian Science Monitor that, as in Colorado, inmates can offset only a fraction of the state's farm-labor shortage. Bush's move came at the height of harvest season in California -- source of about half of the fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. "I'm guessing 80, 90 percent of the ag work force is illegal," one grower told the Associated Press. "Implementing this rule will be catastrophic."

Less Veggies, More Sprawl

In a well-functioning market, farmers would raise wages to draw in more workers, and pass the increased costs on to their buyers: the big supermarkets, restaurant chains, and food processors. But as a California Farm Bureau official told AP, those entities will likely reject domestic price hikes and look to other parts of the world for produce. "If our guys try to raise prices, they are going to be replaced by foreign production," he said. In essence, he's arguing that fruit and vegetable farming, like manufacturing over the past generation, has entered a "race to the bottom": a relentless hunt for cheap labor markets and lax regulatory regimes.Is that just Farm Bureau spin? Not likely. Indeed, the U.S. is already outsourcing an increasing share of its fruit and veg production. As this USDA backgrounder [PDF] from April 2006 shows, the import share of U.S. vegetable consumption has been rising steadily, from about 7 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005. Fruit imports (excluding bananas) as a percentage of consumption have also doubled, rising from 12 percent in 1992-1994 to 24 percent in 2002-2004. Much of that jump can be explained by off-season purchases -- the Chilean-asparagus-in-January effect.

But with marketing relationships and trade infrastructure in place, nothing stops distributors from buying, say, cheaper Mexico-grown lettuce over California product, or New Zealand apples over those grown in New York or Washington. California has already seen its once-huge garlic production dwindle, overwhelmed by a flood of cheap -- and nearly flavorless -- Chinese-grown garlic into the U.S. market. What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that's already happening in California. In the state's lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation's most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation. Meanwhile, production of the fruits and vegetables we consume shifts to nations with even weaker regulatory regimes than ours, meaning more insecticides and other agricultural chemicals released into the biosphere. And increasing distances mean burning more fossil fuel to haul that suspect bounty from farm to table. While these grand global trends are indeed overwhelming to think about, there's no need to feel disempowered. Get involved with burgeoning movements, nationwide and globally, to rebuild local (and, yes, regional) food systems that don't thrive by exploiting labor and trashing the land.

Meanwhile, while U.S. vegetable farming gets squeezed between labor shortages and global competition, other, less labor-intensive forms of U.S. agriculture -- namely industrial grain and meat production -- thrive in the global marketplace. And that will be the topic of the next column.

Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.