Many Americans may be mystified about why South Koreans by the tens of thousands are protesting President Lee Myung-bak’s plan to lift restrictions on the import of U.S. beef.
“Mad Cow, You Eat It!” protesters chant.
Is there something we don’t know about our own meat supply?
The short answer is yes. For starters, Koreans are concerned that the U.S. Agriculture Department tests less than one percent of all slaughtered or dead American beef cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, a progressive brain-wasting disorder which is also fatal to humans. In contrast, Japan tests all cattle at the time of slaughter; the European Union tests about one out of four cattle.
Beyond that, the Agriculture Department has prevented beef providers from voluntarily screening for the disease.
Well aware that Japanese and Korean customers were wary of U.S. testing, a small Kansas-based supplier called Creekstone Farms Premium Beef spent more than $500,000 to install a state-of-the-art BSE testing laboratory in 2004 - the first in a U.S. slaughterhouse - and hired seven chemists and biologists to staff it.
But the Agriculture Department stopped the company from opening the lab. The department said the test could be used only as part of its own mad cow surveillance program, which randomly checks about 1 in 1,000 dead and slaughtered cattle every year. It cited an obscure 1913 law intended to thwart con artists from peddling bogus hog cholera serum to pig farmers that allows the department to prohibit veterinary products it considers “worthless.”
Creekstone sued the government in 2006, arguing the Agriculture Department could not deem worthless a test that it uses in its own surveillance program. The court agreed, but the government appealed the decision, contending that allowing Creekstone to do additional screening might lead consumers to conclude that meat from other companies is unsafe. It also claims that false positive results for BSE could have a negative impact on cattle and beef markets.
A ruling is expected shortly.
Consumer advocates say that the court battle with Creekstone is simply the latest indication of how the department’s policies are guided by the interests of cattle ranchers rather than by consumers.
For years, advocates have worried about the Agriculture Department’s dual, often conflicting mission - to promote the sale of American beef on behalf of U.S. meat producers and, at the same time, guarantee its safety.
Advocates assert that because the Bush Administration put former meat and dairy executives in charge of regulating their former employers, commerce has seemed to trump safety as the department’s No.1 concern.
How else to explain the conflict with Creekstone, they say, or the testimony of a top Agriculture Department official in June, 2003, that mad cow disease was not a threat to U.S. consumers and that it was unnecessary to require producers to label meat to identify a cow’s country of origin before slaughter?
The official who gave that testimony before Congress - Deputy Undersecretary Charles Lambert - had made that same argument numerous times in his 15 years at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the trade association for the U.S. cattle industry. Lambert worked as the association’s lobbyist and chief economist before joining the Agriculture Department.
“Is there a possibility that (the disease) could get through?” Rep. Joe Baca, a California Democrat, asked Lambert, according to Anne C. Mulkern of the Denver Post.
Lambert answered, “No, sir.”
“None at all?” Baca asked.
“No,” Lambert replied.
“You would bet your life on it - your job on it, right?”
Lambert answered, “Yes, sir.”
The disease was discovered in the U.S. six months later - apparently brought here by a cow from Canada. Two more infected cows have since been discovered in the U.S.
Besides Lambert, other former industry executives working in top Agriculture Department jobs include:
- Deputy Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs J. Burton Eller Jr., who had been executive vice president for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
- James E. Link, administrator for grain inspection, packers and stockyards administration, who had been a committee member of the national cattlemen’s group, as well as director of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raiser’s Association
- Deputy Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services Floyd D. Gaibler, who had headed the National Cheese Institute and been a vice president of the Agricultural Retailers Association
- Deputy Undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services James Butler who joined USDA after serving as partner in Butler & Son Charolais Ranch, a Texas cattle company
- Chief of Staff Dale Moore, who had been the chief lobbyist for the cattlemen’s association
- Deputy Chief of Staff Beth Johnson, who had worked as an associate director of food policy for the cattlemen’s association
- Ellen Terpstra, who had headed the USA Rice Federation and the U.S. Apple Association, other trade groups.
In a 2004 op-ed piece, “The Cow Jumped Over the U.S.D.A.,” Eric Schlosser wrote that, “you’d have a hard time finding a federal agency more completely dominated by the industry it was created to regulate.”
Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, an investigation of the U.S. fast food industry, points out that the U.S. is hardly alone in allowing a cozy relationship between regulator and regulated industry.
In both Europe and Japan, he argues, the spread of mad cow disease was facilitated by the repeated failure of government ministries to act on behalf of consumers.
In Britain, where mad cow disease was discovered, the ministry of agriculture misled the public about the risks of the disease from the beginning. In December 1986, the first government memo on the new pathogen warned that it might have ‘’severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for humans” and thus all news of it was to be kept ”confidential.”
Ten years later, when Britons began to fall sick with Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, thought to be the human form of mad cow, British Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg assured consumers that ”British beef is wholly safe,” Schlosser wrote. Hence, the shock when several months later, Health Minister Stephen Dorrell told Parliament that mad cow disease might indeed be able to sicken human beings.
While the disease is extremely rare, it is also extremely deadly. Since 1986, it has killed more than 200 people worldwide, mostly in Britain. There is no known instance of U.S. beef causing a case of the human variant of the disease, although three people in the U.S. contracted it, apparently after eating tainted beef elsewhere.
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