The food industry offered generous financial backing to George Bush’s presidential election campaign and has continued to support Republicans in Congress. Has this generosity eased the path of regulatory decisions in their favour, possibly at the expense of public health? James C. Webster, former assistant secretary for governmental and public affairs at the USDA, investigates.
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If measured as return on investment, the US food industry’s contribution of US$39m to election campaigns for President George Bush in 2000 and Republicans in Congress then and last year would surpass recent years’ earnings on stocks, bonds and real estate. There is no allegation of quid pro quo that directly links it with their campaign contributions, but the list of regulatory decisions in their favour has grown noticeably. In the words of one consumer activist, government appears “eager to do the bidding of big food companies.”
Leading up to the 2000 election, food companies and their employees contributed nearly $24.8 million to the campaigns for Bush and Republican candidates for Congress. Industry contributions to Democrats’ campaigns that year totalled US$10m. For last year’s congressional elections, with no presidential campaign, their donations to Republicans were nearly $22.6m, according to data compiled by the Centre for Responsive Politics.
Many of the contributions were channelled through the industry’s Washington-based lobbying associations – the retailers’ Food Marketing Institute gave $688,661 last year, Grocery Manufacturers of America $435,468, International Dairy Foods Association $359,992 the food service brokers’ Food Distributors International $307,432, and National Food Processors Association $224,111. The National Restaurant Association added $827,813 to the total. But many individual companies contributed directly – PepsiCo $1.4m, Smithfield Foods $399,500, Ocean Spray Cranberries $298,750, Safeway Stores $285,327 and ConAgra Foods $204,800.
Among the top fundraisers for the Bush campaign in 2002 were FMI chief executive Tim Hammonds; Gregg Engles of Dean Foods, the largest US dairy firm; Lonnie Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Pride, the No. 2 poultry company; and J. Nelson Fairbanks of US Sugar Corporation.
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By GlobalDataRelationship with the White House much improved
Although the industry’s lobbyists had access to officials at the White House, the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture during Democrats’ previous tenure, there is no doubt that they have enjoyed closer relations with Republican office-holders since Bush took office, and to Republican leaders in Congress.
The decisions of the past two years bear out the critics’ belief that the industry’s influence is considerable. FDA’s decision to remove a warning from packages of foods made with Procter & Gamble’s fat substitute Olestra was criticised by Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, which has fought Olestra for many years on the grounds that it caused intestinal distress. “This is just another in a string of setbacks for the public’s health,” he said, “engineered by an FDA that seems all too eager to do the bidding of big food companies.
But FDA and USDA also have irritated consumer groups and pleased the industry in several other key decisions. Food trade association lobbyists praised FDA effusively this year when it proposed to relax the standard of evidence for health claims on food labels and for its final decision on a rule to require labels to disclose the content of trans fats in foods; After hearing complaints from the industry, FDA relaxed proposals for new label rules that had been drawn up in 1999 during the Clinton Administration.
Weaker labelling on trans fats
Chief Science Officer Rhona Applebaum of NFPA, which petitioned for the health claims label rule in 1994, says it will “help food companies increase consumer access to accurate, science-based information on the health benefits of food products by putting it directly on food labels.” But CSPI’s Legal Affairs Director Bruce Silverglade sees it as “the biggest rollback in food-labelling standards in 20 years.” He adds, “Food companies have been clamouring for weaker regulation for a decade. The Bush FDA is finally giving them what they want.”
Alison Kretser, GMA’s director of scientific and nutrition policy, says the trans-fat label rules “will allow consumers to make informed choices about which products to purchase based on their own preferences and health needs.” The final rule deleted from the 1999 proposal a label admonition that trans fat intake “should be as low as possible;” GMA had objected, saying such a statement would be misleading and “lead consumers to believe that trans fat should be avoided entirely, while implying that saturated fat is safer.” CSPI, however, finds the rule “another retreat from its 1999 proposal” because FDA “will allow food manufacturers to use claims like ‘low in saturated fat’ on labels for products that have a lot of trans fat.”
Consumer activists also believe a pro-industry bias has permeated several USDA regulatory decisions favouring the food industry. Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman won their praise in March with a speech saying USDA should have stronger legislative authority to close meat plants that consistently produce unsafe products. But, after “hostile industry reaction,” says Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, USDA pulled back and continues to oppose the legislation that would confer the additional powers.
Stance on country-of-origin labelling and irradiation under fire
CFA also faults USDA for its opposition to a requirement that meat carry labels to show its country of origin – a law vigorously resisted by meat processors and retailers – and for launching a “promotion campaign” to encourage the use of irradiated meat in school meals.
Comments by Foreman, the assistant secretary in charge of food safety at USDA in the late 1970s, in the last two years read like a pattern of meat industry favouritism in USDA decisions. The agency refused for more than two years – “at the urging of industry” – to take action on a proposal to require meat and poultry plants to test for Listeria contamination. The October 2001 recall and 13 deaths linked to poultry from a Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Pennsylvania were, Foreman says, “the result of inexcusable dereliction of duty” by USDA. Even when USDA issued the final rule, she says, it was lacking a key provision of the original proposal that “was vigorously opposed by industry and may have been removed by the Office of Management and Budget.”
The Government Accountability Project, a labour union-financed effort to aid government employees who disclose wrongdoing by their agencies, sees similar problems in the way USDA handled the discovery of E.coli 0157:H7 in meat processed at a Colorado plant owned by ConAgra Foods last year that led to the third largest meat recall in US history. For nearly two years, says Tom Devine, legal director of the project, “Top USDA officials actively covered up the problems at ConAgra.”
