Toronto Star
February 14, 2001
Politics of Food Safety
By Stuart Laidlaw
A week after insisting that mad cow is a ``European disease'' - and as such poses little if any threat to consumers - Canadian regulators were ordering that Brazilian beef be hauled off grocery shelves because of a mad cow scare.
Mad cow, it seemed, had also become a South American disease.
But then another week later, and two of the government's own scientists were questioning the validity of the ban, saying it may have had more to do with a trade dispute between Canada and Brazil over aircraft manufacturing than public health.
By the third week, Canada, under threat of a trade war with Brazil, decided to send a team of scientists to Brazil to check out the situation for themselves.
Whatever they decide, Canada's regulatory system has suffered a serious credibility problem that is going to be tough to overcome.
The ban was imposed after a newspaper there said Brazil had kept importing British beef long after most countries had stopped because of mad cow outbreaks in the U.K.
If that's why the ban was imposed, it raises serious questions about the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency's ability to keep out mad cow. By focusing on mad cow as a European disease, the agency - charged with maintaining the safety of our food supply - didn't see that it might have slipped in through the back door until a foreign newspaper pointed it out.
But even more disturbing is the allegation - denied by both the food inspection agency and the federal Liberals - that the ban has more to do with Brazil's subsidies to its aircraft industry than food safety. Certainly the timing of the ban - one day after the World Trade Organization rejected Canada's request that it review subsidies to Brazilian jet maker Embraer - is interesting.
So, too, is word that the United States and Mexico are considering lifting their bans on Brazilian beef, which they imposed in tandem with Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Brazil has given Canada three weeks to lift the ban or it will abandon talks toward a hemispheric free trade zone and slap trade sanctions on Canadian products. Lifting the beef ban now, however, could hurt the already shaky legitimacy of the food inspection agency.
While all this was going on, the agency was under severe attack from two reports released last week.
The Royal Society of Canada's report began the week by saying the agency is in a ``significant conflict of interest'' as both a promoter and regulator of genetically modified foods, saying this dual role ``compromises the integrity of regulatory science and decision making, as well as public perception of that integrity.''
By mid-week, the auditor-general released a scathing report questioning the agency's ability to ensure the safety of Canada's food, calling for more inspections of Canada's slaughterhouses and the millions of animals that pass through them each year.
There are, however, some good things being done. The beef industry, for instance, has a tagging system to assign each steer its own identification number. Should we ever have a mad cow outbreak, Canada will be able to pull potentially diseased animals out of the food chain quickly.
But a tagging system is only valuable if we are checking for the disease, and know which animals to remove from the market.
Canada has prohibited most beef imports from Europe and banned the use of cattle remains to make feed for other cattle, believed to be the main way mad cow is spread.
We must do more, however, to ensure all the rules are being followed.
The U.S., which has similar rules to Canada's, decided last year to check whether its rules were, in fact, being followed. What it found was astonishing: of 9,500 animal feed manufacturers visited, only 2,700 were abiding by the rules; half were not putting the proper labels on their products; and a quarter had no systems in place to make sure that feed made from cows would not be fed to cows.
A similar check with drug companies found they were likewise not doing enough to keep mad cow out of their products.
Canada needs a similar blitz, stepping up inspections to make sure that the rules here are being followed - in short, doing the kind of on the ground, intensive inspections we are carrying out in Brazil this week. The U.S. experience shows that putting good regulations in place is not enough. You have to make sure they are being followed.
There are other tales of caution.
The Italian government once reassured its people that they were safe from mad cow because the country had closed its borders to risky meat - a reassurance eerily similar to those now being offered to Canadian consumers. To prove its point, Rome launched a massive testing program, determined to prove there was no mad cow disease in Italy.
Well, guess what? The inspectors found mad cow, and beef sales have plummeted.
One slaughterhouse found to have processed a cow with the deadly disease said the scare is overblown, saying people are more at threat of tripping over a vase and hurting themselves than they are of getting mad cow disease.
That's certainly true, but if I keep my eyes open, I can see the vase in front of me and avoid tripping over it. Mad cow is proving much more difficult to avoid. It has a way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it.
It could have come to Canada through Brazil, or some other country, or through the 2.8 million kilograms of blood meal, meat scraps, bone meal and waste meat Canada has imported from Europe since 1996, or been introduced to the food chain through deer or elk with their form of the disease.
But whatever the source, unless Canadian regulators are keeping their eyes open, and able to avoid becoming pawns in a trade war, Canadian consumers are likely to keep tripping over mad cow disease until someone gets hurt.
Stuart Laidlaw is a member of The Star's editorial board.