How does Bush's new import safety "plan" bamboozle you? ... It doesn't mean what you think it means.

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



E. coli conservatism coverup (Part I)
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on November 19, 2007 - 11:50am.


"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." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/e_coli_conservatism_coverup_part_i?tx=3