Food Safety in Conference Spotlight : Consumers: Many American Chemical Society members believe the cancer risks posed by farm chemicals are negligible. Others, however, say safer alternatives must be found.
The mood was sullen here as a chemical industry trade group and government regulators met last week to discuss ways of regaining public confidence in food safety. The dialogue comes after a year of highly charged debate about potentially dangerous pesticide residues in fresh produce, meats and processed foods.
Many of the 250 in attendance at the American Chemical Society’s conference believed that the cancer risks posed to consumers by farm chemicals is negligible. Others, however, argued strongly that the industry “needs to clean up its act” by removing dangerous compounds from the market and develop safer alternatives.
The event was organized by the society’s agrochemical division and drew participants from a wide spectrum including chemists, manufacturers, growers, processors, academicians, Congressional staffers and environmentalists.
The meeting goal’s was to formulate recommendations on how the federal government could better control and regulate farm chemical usage. The gathering is also timely because there are a number of bills pending before Congress that address this particular aspect of the food safety question.
“We need to regain credibility with the country on this issue,” said William A. Stiles Jr., a subcommittee staff director with the House Committee on Agriculture. “(According to industry opinion polls) pesticide residues became the top food safety concern of the public in 1985 (at the peak of ethylene dibromide (EDB) controversy) and it has stayed there ever since. . . . But the chemical residue issue is not insurmountable.”
Despite Stiles’ optimism, the conferees were repeatedly bogged down when attempting agreement on just how much pesticide residue, if any, on foods could be considered an acceptable cancer risk.
Some are content with a safety factor of one in a million. In other words, the introduction of a chemical into the food system would be approved if it was responsible for no more than one additional cancer case per one million people in the nation’s population. Such a level would indicate, however, that it’s not possible to totally eliminate risk from all the compounds used in modern agricultural production.
Others argue for a less stringent standard that would take into account the benefits of a chemical to the food supply as well as its health risk.
“There has never been a dialogue on pesticide use in which the public was a part,” said John Moore, from the Institute for Evaluating Health Risks in Irvine, Calif. “There are a lot of different perspectives on this issue but all seem so polarized. There is no agreement on a common goal. So, how are you ever going to be able to have success?”
Moore, former acting director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said that any policy that fails to acknowledge that the public faces some risk--but also gains benefits--from pesticide usage is flawed.
“A zero-risk stance is not operative today. It was lost forever when we started to use these chemicals in 1945,” he said.
There is inadequate data available today from government sources on what kind of chemical exposure the public is getting from residues in food, Moore said. Absent complete data on the chemical threat and the related dietary risks, he said, there can be no successful regulatory program.
“If you want the public to calm down, then just rhetoric isn’t going to do it,” he said.
Moore’s comments weighed heavily on the meeting because he was the EPA official who faced intense criticism for his agency’s handling of Alar, a growth regulator, on apples in February, 1989.
And Moore’s complaint that the government lacked sufficient data on the pesticide issue was also echoed by a Florida researcher who investigated the problem for Congress.
Anson Moye, a pesticide researcher for the University of Florida in Gainesville, said that the present pesticide monitoring system is woefully inadequate. His conclusions were from an Office of Technology Assessment report.
“Of the 360 active ingredients found in farm chemicals only 50% can be detected by the Food and Drug Administration’s residue monitoring program,” said Moye. “That is a flaw that has to be cured. We need to analyze for more pesticides than what we analyze for now.”
Moye was also critical of the federal government’s strategy to eventually solve this problem.
“There are no long-term plans within FDA or the U.S. Department of Agriculture that would require improved methods of testing for pesticides,” he said. At present, the various federal agencies that deal with food safety do not even communicate well with each other, Moye said.
Even those government regulators present at the meeting acknowledged that the public is right to harbor some food safety concerns.
“Through technology, the United States has the most efficient food and fiber system in the world. But there is a cost with that technology that we didn’t think of at first,” said Charles Hess, USDA assistant secretary. “There is a public perception that our food supply may not be safe. People question the use of chemicals in the farm system and the resulting residues in food. I can’t say truthfully that these fears are groundless.”
The leading critic of the current monitoring system is the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group. The council’s report on the heightened cancer risk to children from some farm chemical residue in food touched off 1989’s furor over Alar on apples.
A senior attorney for the council told the conferees that there are at least a dozen other chemicals currently being used on food that should be banned.
“There has been a failure to grapple with the magnitude of this problem,” said the council’s Janet Hathaway. “There are 12 pesticides that are high priority risks that exceed the one in a million cancer risk level. . . . Public confidence in food safety will be called into question unless issues such as these are resolved.”
At the meeting’s end several recommendations were formulated by the group and the information will be forwarded to officials at FDA, USDA and EPA.
Among these were:
* The government should come to a consensus on what is an acceptable amount of residue in food.
* Determine the actual amount of farm chemicals being used in the production of food and fiber in this country in order to better determine public exposure to these compounds.
* Develop better communications between the government and the public on the food safety issue.
One New England apple grower who spoke to the convention best summarized the proceedings.
“We are waiting for the era of safer compounds and no amount of wishing will get us there,” said Steven Wood, of Poverty Lane Orchards in West Lebanon, N.H. “Any solution needs to take into account that we must provide food for an overcrowded world without messing up the planet and making people sick. It will take time to get there.”
