Report points out dangers of pending trade pacts

By Carol Ryan Dumas, Ag Weekly editor
Friday, August 3, 2007 1:44 PM CDT

WASHINGTON n Four pending free-trade agreements will threaten the safety of the food U.S. consumers eat and tie the hands of government to require safe-food standard on imports, according to a report released Wednesday, July 25, by Public Citizen.

A national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, Public Citizen represent consumer interests in government and the courts. The organization held a joint press conference Wednesday with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard.

The report, Trade Deficit in Food Safety; Proposed NAFTA Expansions Replicate Limits on U.S. Food Safety Policy That Are Contributing to Unsafe Food Imports, documents the connection between trade agreements that limit domestic food-safety policies to facilitate trade. It also points out the growing safety threat posed by food imports, which have doubled since implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization agreements.

Proposed free-trade agreements with Peru, Panama, South Korea and Colombia were at the heart of the press conference. Public Citizen contends the agreements would not only increase food imports that are not held to U.S. standards but would also replicate past trade-pact limits on safety standards the United States can require for and how much inspection is permitted.

“We face a perverse situation in which Congress is rushing to address serious safety problems with the growing amount of imported food Americans consume while four more NAFTA-style trade deals are pending that will undermine Congress’ ability to ensure our safety,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division. “This is a trade problem that is not just about China, but rather goes to a trade model that prioritizes increasing the volume of traded food over safety.”

Wallach was referring to recent U.S. findings of contamination in toothpaste, fish and pet food imported from China.

The bottom line is there’s just no way to fix our food-safety problems without fixing our trade agreements,” she said.

Sen. Brown agreed, saying, “When you look at the gains we’ve made in this country on food safety … and all that we have done with our regulatory structure for food safety, all of that is jeopardized by free-trade agreements that pay little or no attention to food safety, and that’s really what we’re seeing.”

Brown said most of the countries exporting to the United States don’t have a regulatory structure even remotely comparable with that of the United States.

“We shouldn’t be buying food from countries who don’t have that regulatory structure,” he said.

“We know that imports of food have gone up dramatically … and that’s generally a good thing because it means people have choices and can have better diets,” he said. “But it’s less of a good thing if we’re not inspecting those imports, and we haven’t been.”

Brown said as food imports have gone up, the number of FDA inspectors has gone down. In 2003, there were almost 3,200 FDA food inspectors n now there are 2,800.

“The problem, in part, is that this administration believes you can do free trade on the cheap, and you can’t do free trade on the cheap,” he said. “If we’re going to pass trade agreements, they need to reflect the regulatory structure we have in this country, and then we need to do inspections n both at the border, and at the point of process. We do neither of those very well. If we’re going to trade on the cheap, the way this administration wants to do n and has done n then food-safety problems are inevitable.”

Brown said he, along with Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., will soon be rolling out model trade legislation that will include food and product safety standards, adding that tackling the trade end of the situation will be much more difficult than finding money for more inspectors,

“The bar has been set so low, it’ll take us some time to get where we’re supposed to be,” he said.

Wallach said there are three fundamental problems with U.S. free-trade agreements: The U.S. has weakened inspections on imports; the country has relied on foreign inspections; and any disputes go to a tribunal to be decided. The four pending agreements would further limit the United States’ ability to require food-safety standards and inspections on an increased amount of foreign food and would empower foreign companies and producers to challenge the United States if its food-safety standards threaten their future trade and business.

R-CALF’s Bullard said food safety and the cattle industry would suffer. Animal agriculture doesn’t have the same production standards in most foreign countries as it does in the United States.

“You can’t fix that with an inspection at the border,” he said. “There are serious fundamental problems with (U.S.) trade policy. The problem is universal in all food products but particularly to cattle because of the length of time of production.”

These trade agreements will lock U.S. farmers and ranchers into a competitive disadvantage, he added.

“As a result, we will continue to see an erosion of our rural communities that are dependent on the U.S. cattle industry because we will be systematically replacing domestic production with larger volumes of imported product.”

Bullard said the effect of the trade agreements with Panama and Peru would be that the United States would change its position so the default becomes open borders, or what he called “a borderless America.”

“And then, if there’s a problem with food safety, the burden would shift,” he said. “The burden would be placed upon the shoulders of the importing country to prove that any food-safety problems need to be corrected by restrictions or sanctions. That’s very different than how we currently trade with other countries, where they must first prove that they are meeting the standards of the United States.”

Wallach said the pending FTAs establish new committees to speed up implementation of mechanisms to facilitate trade rules, including “equivalence determinations,” which require the United States to permit imports of meat and poultry products that do not meet U.S. safety standards. Once so-called equivalence is achieved, products to be imported into a country must meet only the standards of the exporting country n not those of the importing country.

To read the full report, got to http://www.citizens.org

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