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By Root 1288 0

in our economy. If Congress gave the FDA the authority to reject foods from countries with lower safety standards, countries with higher standards might refuse to accept our products. The result: trade problems. Other countries, after all, can exercise their own rights of equivalency. In 2002, for example, Russia temporarily banned imports of U.S. poultry, saying the chickens carried influenza, had been treated with antibiotics, and were contaminated with Salmonella. The ban affected nearly one-quarter of the more than 1 million tons of frozen chicken (worth $640 million) expected to be exported to Russia that year. U.S. officials argued that the Russians were more worried about protecting their own chicken production than about safety. Trade negotiators worked for three weeks to resolve the dispute.3 Regardless of the agencies’ need for more inspection resources, any additional regulatory authority over imported foods might backfire if trading partners refused our exports.4 Hence, politics.

International trade issues related to food safety are resolved through a commission of the United Nations known as Codex Alimentarius (Latin for “food code”). The commission’s purpose is to “promote the elaboration and establishment of definitions and requirements for foods, to assist in their harmonization and, in doing so, to facilitate international trade.”5 With respect to food safety, this goal places the commission in potential conflict of interest; the Codex promotes safe food on the one hand, but trade on the other. As it turns out, trade issues almost always take precedence, perhaps because of the commission’s composition. Among the nearly 2,600 individuals who participated in Codex meetings in the early 1990s, for example, 25% represented industry while only 1% represented public interest groups (the others were government officials). Among delegates from the United States at that time, nearly half (49%) were drawn from industry.6 That imbalance continues.

The Codex commission asserts that its safety standards are science based. If so, it can—and does—demand that members view its requirements as legitimate protections rather than trade barriers. In practice, the commission’s efforts to “harmonize” the differing food safety regulations of member nations appear as pressures to lower standards: “Members shall ensure that any sanitary and phytosanitary measure is applied only to the extent necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life or health, is based on scientific principles and is not maintained without sufficient scientific evidence.”5 Because scientific proof of safety is difficult to attain, and the results of most (if not all) scientific studies are subject to interpretation, the Codex criteria leave much room for trade disagreements in which science is invoked in the self-interest of one country or another.

A 1997 U.S. outbreak of Cyclospora attributed to Guatemalan raspberries illustrates how difficult it can be to sort out such disputes. Until the mid-1980s, Guatemala did not grow raspberries. Then, during the country’s campaign against leftist guerrillas, the U.S. Agency for International Development promoted development of “nontraditional agriculture” and encouraged farmers to grow exotic foods for North Americans as cash crops rather than continuing to grow corn and beans for themselves. Production grew rapidly. In 1992, Guatemala produced less than 4,000 pounds of the berries, but in 1996 it shipped 700,000 pounds.

Guatemalan raspberries become ripe and are ready to ship in April and May, when there is no competing source. Spring rains, however, encourage the growth of Cyclospora, a common cause of diarrhea among Guatemalan children and of illness among raspberry pickers. During the outbreak in the United States, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found Cyclospora in the feces of people who had eaten Guatemalan raspberries. They did not, however, find the bacteria in the raspberries. Nevertheless, as a measure of prudence, they advised the public not to eat Guatemalan