Coincidentally, an announcement concerning the nation's largest beef recall occurred on the same day that Bruce Freitag's letter to the editor ("No time to roll dice on crops") ran in The Forum. What's the connection? In a word: food. More specifically, food made possible via biotechnology.
Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., based in Chino, Calif., recalled 143 million pounds of ground beef, some of which went to school lunch programs. This recall is part of an animal-abuse scandal that started after the Humane Society of the United States made public a video showing workers kicking sick cows and using forklifts to force the animals to walk.
The animals in the Humane Society video were dairy cows, so-called downer cows that could not walk and are therefore banned from the U.S. food supply.
While I can't know for certain how old those sick animals were, there's a fair chance those cows were about 5 years old. That's young for dairy cows, only a year or so after the animals have acquired a full set of adult teeth. Dairy cows typically can live between 10 and 20 years.
So what might have happened in California?
Many factory-style dairies inject cows with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which is a genetically engineered copy of a naturally occurring hormone produced by cows. While I don't claim to know why the animals in the Humane Society video got sick, animals injected with rBGH can suffer from increased udder infections (mastitis), severe reproductive problems, digestive disorders, foot and leg ailments, and persistent sores and lacerations--which can add up to an early death.
The manufacturer of rBGH is Monsanto Co., which markets this product under the brand name Posilac. On its Web site, Monsanto offers the following: "Of the nearly nine million dairy cows in the United States, approximately one-third are in herds supplemented with Posilac."
www.monsantodairy.com/about/general_info/index.html
While rBGH is banned in Europe and Canada, the three U.S. agencies charged with regulating genetically engineered foods--the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture--continue to license the product, despite concerns regarding adequate independent, peer-reviewed food safety tests.
There are similar concerns about the lack of long-term food safety tests for the crops Freitag is convinced will feed the world.
Furthermore, the lack of regulatory oversight is as problematic for genetically engineered crops as it is for animals injected with rBGH.
Meanwhile, Freitag's argument ignores this critical fact: Countries that are net exporters of food--including the U.S.--still haven't eliminated hunger at home, even with the "tools" of biotechnology.
Why? Because poverty is the primary cause of worldwide hunger.
Rolling the dice on biotech food is the gamble, and under this scenario, the "house" is represented by the agribusiness corporations.
For those interested in viewing the Humane Society's video or in listening to an account of how rBGH came to market, check out the following:
Hulse lives in Fargo.