E. coli conservatism coverup (Part I)

"We will continually improve the safety of imported products in a manner that expands global trade and protects the health and safety of every American."

Sounds faintly Orwellian, doesn't it? It's our president, and the quote is the epigram from the new report of his Interagency Working Group on Import Safety, released with fanfare by the White House on November 6. It's a big con, of course. Let me explain why. Or begin to explain why; this post will be the first in a series.

Cons need come-ons. Here is this report's: "The seminal finding of the framework was that, to adopt to a rapidly growing and changing global economy, the U.S. government must develop new import safety strategies that expand and emphasize a cost-effective, risk-based approach. Such an approach identifies risks at the points they are most likely to occur, and then targets the response to minimize the likelihood that unsafe products reach U.S. consumers."

That buzzword—"risk-based approach"—appears throughout the document. Kind of like "the Force" and the Star Wars movies. And a risk-based approach sounds perfectly splendid—because it would be perfectly splendid." I called my favorite expert on food safety, Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who oversaw food safety and nutrition programs for the Agriculture Department in the Carter Administration, to learn something about the concept—a concept which, because it appeared in a Bush administration document that had every motive to appear to be reformist while actually being anything but, was automatically suspect to me. She said there was nothing suspect about the concept. "We absolutely believe in a risk-based approach," Carol told me—who wouldn't, after all, "identify risks at the point they are most likely to occur"? The problem is that the Bush administration has systematically stood in the way of making a risk-based approach to food safety even possible.

It works like this. The only good data that exist on food-borne illness count how many illnesses are linked to which pathogen—E. coli, listeriosis, salmonella, etc. "There are no hard data that relate specific food-borne illnesses to specific foods," Carol says.

Meaning this: a new import inspection regime that allocates resources according to risk is impossible, because the government literally doesn't know which foods are "risky."

The Centers for Disease Control has an ongoing project attempting to develop just such data, Carol told me—but there's only two people working on it. I have no reason to doubt that these two people are smart, diligent public servants. But there's only two of them. Just like I have no reason to doubt that the department at the Consumer Product Safety Commission that tests the safety of toys is smart and diligent. But if you've been following this story you know that this department is only one person. His name is "Bob." Imagine a "risk-based approach" to securing the safety of imported toys. That would require reliable data about what kind of toys are most likely, again, to be risky. Bob's not equal to collecting that data. He's too busy dropping toys on the floor in his tiny warren in the back corner of a CPSC testing facilities, to see if any spare parts fly forth that might constitute a choking hazard.

I asked Carol: how many people would the CDC truly need to truly produce the kind of data linking specific foods to specific illnesses in a way that would be the necessary and sufficient condition for an actual "risk-based approach" to food import safety? She responds, "I can't even imagine"—with a pause, then a sigh, as if the number is very large indeed.

So to start out with, the very foundational concept upon which the Bush administration is basing its "new" import-safety "strategy" is revealed as a farce.

I asked Carol about another bit of jargon that wends it way across this 86-page document: the "import life cycle"—as in, for example, "Shift focus from intervention to prevention over the entire import life cycle." That sounds perfectly splendid. What's the hustle behind that? Carol isn't sure. She's never heard that particular buzz phrase before, though she follows these kinds of debates closer than anyone, and has for over thirty years. But she seems pretty confident that it can't portend anything truly useful. "I worry when phrases I don't know keep popping up." They're always coming up with new ways to keep the old cons going—which of necessity means coming up with new PR language to distract and misdirect the public.

[Next time: The "third-party inspectors" hustle.]

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