Food Additive Regulation is Politically Contaminated
Down here at the bottom of the South Pacific, New Zealand’s own regulatory apparatus, overseen by the NZ Food Safety Authority and the Environmental Risk Management Authority, is completely dependent on the trustworthiness of data on chemical and biotech-generated products which have gone through the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and/or US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approval processes. Little surprise in this. Both Australia and New Zealand are client nations of the United States, feeding a steady stream of data on the Islamic terrorism fiction into the US-dominated world police networks, assisting the “renditioning” of innocent citizens for US CIA torture sessions via air bases controlled by the USA in both countries, and monitoring its own citizens’ electronic communication on behalf of the US’s eavesdropping Echelon electronic paranoia labyrinth.
South Pacific food safety activists quickly learn that whenever they challenge their local regulatory system the FDA and EPA will be regularly cited as the authorities on the safety of any chemical or biotech product being challenged. In truth neither Australia nor New Zealand, in particular, have either the resources, the expert personnel or – more importantly – the will to independently test and/or challenge American safety test data. This situation is not unique to the South Pacific region. It applies internationally. The US approval process is basically accepted worldwide by most independent nations, particularly in the Third World where US aid packages come with the proviso of carte blanche access for American corporates.
What the world public are completely unaware of, however, is the degree to which the Washington regulatory and governmental administration machine has been completely taken over by the very industries it is supposed to be controlling for the safety of ordinary American citizens and the wider world community exposed to US chemical and biotech products. Just for a start, all the key scientific advisory committees which advise the FDA are staffed by experts either employed directly by the industries whose chemical/pharmaceutical products they are being asked to regulate or who have some financial interest in the product and/or the company producing it.
A USA TODAY analysis (25.9.2000) of financial conflicts of interest at 159 FDA advisory committee meetings from January 1st, 1998, through to June 30th 2000 found:
- At 92% of the meetings, at least one member had a financial conflict of interest.
- At 55% of meetings, half or more of the FDA advisers had conflicts of interest.
- Conflicts were most frequent at the 57 meetings when broader issues were discussed: 92% of members had conflicts at such meetings.
- At the 102 meetings dealing with the fate of a specific drug, 33% of the experts had a financial conflict.
Furthermore, many key FDA and EPA employees are actually joining federal regulatory ranks from the industries they are being expected to regulate and will, at some future date, go back to those same industries with insider knowledge on how to manipulate toxic products through the regulatory process. One could perhaps predict that even Washington regulars must find it difficult at times to remember if a FDA or EPA regulator or staffer is either a former Monsanto staff member or about to become one. As the following updated run-down of the Washington regulatory and administration machine illustrates, big corporations – and particularly Monsanto in its various incarnations – is so tightly intermeshed with the vital machinery of American governance that everything Big Business wants it can clearly get – and largely without any interference from the checks and balances that sometimes still operate in the rest of the democratic world outside the USA.
Clearly the regulatory apparatus worldwide needs to treat any technical data approved by the US FDA and/or EPA as highly suspect and in need of further close analysis. The institutionalised nature of the US regulatory problem can only be understood by examining the following examples drawn from the situation as it applied in July 2003 (with some update mention of Rumsfeld to 2006 and discussion of some 2009 developments under the new Obama White House administration.)
Chris Wheeler - August 2009