What’s for dinner?
Fruit and Veggies laced with pesticides?
Oysters tainted with Listeria?
Shrimp sautéed with Salmonella?
Spinach with a side of E. coli?
Just plain filthy fish?
Hungry yet? In the last couple months, I know many of us have thought twice while picking our food for our families at the supermarket, and we should. The CDC estimates that 76 million Americans suffer from foodborne illnesses every year, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die.
While the mainstream media is happy to tell the public of the great threats to their health and safety, scaring them stiff into watching the evening news, they rarely ask why the flood of dangerous imports is happening and of our leaders, what can be done to stop it.
A new report by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch offers an answer to those questions. The report called “Trade Deficit in Food Safety: Proposed NAFTA Expansions Replicate Limits on U.S. Food Safety Policy that Are Contributing to Unsafe Food Imports” draws the link between the Bush administration’s damaging trade policies and our food safety problems.
Our food imports have increased sharply, almost doubling in value, since NAFTA and the WTO passed in the mid-`90s. Seafood imports alone have increased 65 percent. For the first time in 2005, the United States, formerly known as the world’s bread basket, became a net food importer, with a food deficit of nearly $370 million.
There may not be anything inherently wrong with increasing the food imports into our country, but there is something inherently dangerous about doing so when our ability to inspect those imports is decreasing even more sharply than our increase in imports. In 1992, the FDA inspected 8% of all the food imports under its jurisdiction. In 2006, the inspection rate is now less than one percent, a staggering .6%.
NAFTA started this trend, and the Bush administration’s policy of free-trade-at-any-cost has made it worse. Under Bush, the U.S. has already expanded NAFTA to Central America and is now pushing for passage of NAFTA-expansion deals to Peru, Panama, Colombia, and South Korea.
The real problem is that these so-called “trade” agreements do more than increase trade of goods between nations. Trade rules incorporated into the proposed FTAs with Peru, Panama, Colombia and South Korea limit food safety standards and border inspection. The agreements require the United States to rely on foreign regulatory structures and foreign safety inspectors to ensure that food imports are safe. The agreements require that the U.S. food safety regulators treat imported food the same as domestically produced food, even though more intensive inspection of imported goods is needed to compensate for often weak domestic regulatory systems in some exporting nations.
Last November, Democrats won a much-needed and much-deserved majority in Congress, and trade issues played no small part in helping usher in new leadership. 37 supporters of our failed trade policy lost their seats to Democrats campaigning on fair trade. The food safety issue is just one aspect of the Bush administration’s trade policy that has hurt Americans, but it’s also an issue that Democrats can start fixing right now to make a real difference in people’s lives. While several Democratic leaders have proposed legislation to help mend our food safety regulatory system, none of those steps will suffice if our leaders keep passing these Bush administration trade deals. The first step that Democrats can take is to vote “no” to NAFTA expansions to Peru, Panama, Colombia, and South Korea.
To read the report, sign a petition or find out what you can do to protect yourself from dangerous imports visit http://www.citizen.org/trade/food/ or read our blog, http://www.eyesontrade.org for continuing coverage of the unsafe food import crisis.