The
American right wing loves to hate Big Government, but does size matter?
Perhaps the problem is not Big Government, but Dumb Government,
Inefficient Government or even Corrupt, Sold-Out, or Inept Government.
The recent bombshell Consumers Union, publisher of
Consumer Reports, dropped – that
rice contains dangerous levels of arsenic
– illustrates how good, effective government can save lives by keeping
deadly toxins out of the food supply whereas our federal bureaucracy
(aided, abetted and cajoled by industry) has instead let us down.
Arsenic
“is considered the number one environmental chemical of concern for
human health effects both in the U.S. and worldwide,” according to
information published by Darmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research
Program. It can be divided into two categories: organic and inorganic.
While organic arsenic is itself a probable human carcinogen, inorganic
arsenic is a definite human carcinogen that is linked to liver, lung,
kidney, bladder, and skin cancer as well as “increased risk of vascular
and heart disease, type 2 diabetes, reproductive and developmental
disorders, low birth weights in babies, neurological and cognitive
problems, immunodeficiencies, metabolic disorders, and a growing list of
other serious outcomes.”
In short: you don’t want this in your food.
“When
you're talking about a carcinogen [like arsenic], there is no safe
level,” Consumers Union’s senior scientist Michael Hansen explains.
Instead of eliminating all risk, one looks at carcinogens in terms of
levels of risk. For example, Consumers Union provides a table explaining
how much rice one can eat
to achieve a 1 in 1,000 lifetime risk of cancer. The federal government
does not limit the amount of arsenic allowed in food, so Consumers
Union based its standard on the EPA’s initial recommendation for arsenic
limits in drinking water (five parts per billion).
In fact, the
drinking water standard – which is now set at 10 parts per billion (ppb)
– is a fine place to begin the story of how government, industry and
arsenic fit together. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element, but the
U.S. has increased the amount of arsenic in our environment and our
farmland over the past century by using 1.6 million tons of it in
agricultural and industrial uses. About half of that amount has been
used since the mid-1960s.
Once in the environment, arsenic – a
chemical element and a heavy metal – does not break down and go away as
do some toxins. Once so much arsenic was sprayed on farms, it was in the
environment for good – and it could find its way into our food and
water. U.S. limits on arsenic in drinking water were set at
50 ppb
in 1942, before arsenic was classified as a carcinogen. But a 1999
report by the National Academy of Sciences showed that this level failed
to protect Americans from an unacceptably high risk of cancer.
The
EPA then proposed lowering the limit for arsenic from 50 ppb to just 5
ppb in 2000. Industry complained, and the Clinton-era EPA settled upon
lowering the limit to just 10 ppb instead. Once George W. Bush took
office, he initially
attempted to block the change,
thus keeping the World War II-era limit of 50 ppb. By November 2001,
the Bush administration gave in to allowing the 10 ppb limit to go
forward. Even still, Sen. Barbara Boxer noted that this 10 ppb limit
would allow three times as much cancer risk as the EPA’s usual goal.
Arsenic
in food deserves some special concern, and yet there are no regulations
limiting it. In addition to arsenic used in industry that finds its way
onto farms, there is arsenic used in agriculture that the farmers
themselves bring to their farms, a practice almost dating back to the
Civil War.
Long before the days of DDT, the first synthetic
pesticides were arsenicals. An arsenical paint pigment called Paris
green was first used against Colorado potato beetles in 1867. Even then,
arsenic’s deadly toxicity was well known – Will Allen tells in his
book,
The War on Bugs, how farmers lost cattle after they ate
potato plants treated with Paris green. Other arsenic pesticides, London
purple and lead arsenic, soon followed Paris green onto the market. By
the 1930s, “well over a hundred million people in the United States
suffered from mild to severe arsenic and lead poisoning,” writes Allen.
Yet
the end of arsenic as a favored pesticide did not come from government –
it came from nature and from the chemical companies. As pests evolved
resistance to arsenical pesticides and as chemical companies supplanted
arsenicals with newer products, arsenicals fell out of favor. Only then
did the government begin canceling some of the registrations of
arsenical pesticides.
And yet, even after arsenicals were
displaced by other pesticides for most uses, half of the arsenic used in
the U.S. has been in the last half century. Recent uses of arsenic fall
into two categories: livestock drugs and pesticides.
Until
recently, the arsenical livestock drugs roxarsone, nitarsone, carbarsone
and arsanilic acid were all used in chickens, turkeys and swine.
Roxarsone
was widely used for disease prevention, weight gain, feed efficiency
and improved pigmentation in chickens from 1944 until it was voluntarily
removed from the market by Pfizer in 2011 following the revelation that
chickens fed roxarsone had inorganic arsenic in their livers. The
latter three are all still legal, regulated by the Food and Drug
Administration.
Once used in chickens, the arsenic in roxarsone
remained in the chickens’ litter, which consists of bedding, droppings,
feathers, and dropped feed. Poultry litter, in turn, served as
fertilizer on farms and – believe it or not – cattle feed. And, as it
turns out, the top rice-producing state in the U.S.,
Arkansas,
is in second place behind Georgia for broiler production. (Of the six
rice-producing states, all rank among the nation’s top broiler
producers, with Mississippi and Texas among the top five, and California
and Missouri among the top 10.)
As pesticides, many arsenicals were phased out over the years, but some uses remain. In 2006, the EPA attempted to essentially
ban the remaining uses of organic arsenicals,
because "following application, these pesticides convert over time to a
more toxic form in soil, inorganic arsenic, and potentially contaminate
drinking water through soil runoff." Following outcry from industry,
EPA backed away from its initial decision.
All organic arsenicals
except one herbicide, monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA), were banned as
of 2009. After that time, MSMA could still be used on sod farms, golf
courses and highway rights of way until the end of 2013. After that,
only one remaining us of any organic arsenical would be permitted: MSMA
on cotton.
As luck would have it, the six rice-growing states are among the
top cotton-growing states:
Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas top the list, with California,
Louisiana and Missouri each growing significant cotton acreage as well.
Rice is so susceptible to taking up arsenic because it is often grown in
fields flooded with water. In fact,
a 2008 study
found that growers can reduce the amount of total and inorganic arsenic
in rice by growing it under “aerobic” (not flooded) conditions. And yet
the same states that grow rice are also the cotton-growing states where
MSMA is still used.
So why does the EPA still allow MSMA on
cotton if arsenicals are so bad that they are banned on absolutely
everything else? Two words: Palmer amaranth. Despite years of warnings,
biotech and chemical companies and cotton growers have created the
perfect weed. Palmer amaranth has evolved resistance to both ALS
inhibitor herbicides and to glyphosate, the active ingredient in
Monsanto’s Roundup, and one plant can produce half a million seeds.
Weeds commonly
evolve resistance to ALS inhibitors,
much more so than for any other class of herbicides. But resistance to
glyphosate was almost unheard of before Monsanto first introduced its
Roundup Ready genetically engineered crops to the market in 1996.
Glyphosate use shot up, giving weeds the evolutionary force needed to
develop resistance. Nowhere was this truer than on fields that rotated
between two Roundup Ready crops, soybeans and cotton.
Glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth first turned up in
GE soybeans and cotton in Georgia in 2005
and before long it was documented across the U.S. including in the
rice-growing states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, and
California. In some case, resistance to both types of herbicides was
found in the same Palmer amaranth plant. The weed has caused growers to
turn to more toxic herbicides, hand-weeding, and even entirely
abandoning their fields.
One last direct outlet for arsenic into
agricultural lands comes from sewage sludge. Under current EPA
regulations, sewage sludge containing 41 parts per million – 41,000
parts per billion – total arsenic can be applied to agricultural land
and even sold to consumers for home garden and lawn use. (Full
disclosure: I recently worked on the Center for Media & Democracy’s
sewage sludge campaign, which opposed the use of sewage sludge in agriculture.) Under
existing law, farmers can apply sewage sludge containing up to 41 kilograms of arsenic per hectare of land.
As
you can see, between them, the USDA, FDA and EPA have allowed
pesticides, pharmaceuticals and practices that led to the toxic load of
arsenic Consumers Union found in rice. The EPA regulated pesticides, the
FDA regulated drugs, and the USDA worked with farmers in many aspects
of agriculture and gave the green light to Roundup Ready crops. It was
no secret that arsenic was going into farms and fields where our food is
grown, and yet the question of where the arsenic went was mostly
ignored. The FDA recently released
its own tests,
confirming Consumers’ Union’s findings. As their data shows, even
organic rice contains arsenic. (Organic farmers cannot use arsenical
pesticides, but they can use manure from chickens fed roxarsone and
other arsenical drugs.)
So is the government to blame for this
massive oversight and public health risk? Michael Hansen doesn’t think
so. “The issue in the larger context isn't so much that it's bad
government,” he says. “If you put it in the proper context, it's not
only the gutting of the regulatory agency but also the control by
industry and outside forces. I think there are definitely people within
the agency who would like to take action on a number of things but they
can't because of the reaction by industry… The power of industry is so
strong, you can't expect the government to take action when they are
trashed left and right.”
Consumers Union recently sent and published three letters, one to the
EPA, one to the
FDA and one to the
USDA,
asking them to rectify all of the problems named in this article so
that no more arsenic finds its way into U.S. farms and so that standards
are set for how much arsenic is allowed into our food supply. They also
commend Congress for introducing the R.I.C.E. Act (Reducing Food-Based
Inorganic and Organic Compounds Exposure Act) and they advocate its
speedy passage (which is not likely in the current politically charged
environment).
When citizens reflect on the size of their
government, surely most would agree that it ought to be “big” enough to
keep arsenic out of the food supply. But the comedy of errors between
three different agencies that allowed so much arsenic onto our farms and
then our dinner tables is exactly the sort of disaster that causes
voters to throw up their hands and wish the government would go away
altogether. Yet, if Hansen is correct, the incompetence shown in this
case was not a matter of bureaucratic ineptness but one of industry’s
capture over the agencies charged with regulating it. Voters going to
the polls need to recognize the problem. Instead of voting for
candidates who vow to get government out of our lives we should be
voting for leaders willing to take a stand against undue corporate
influence.
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