Monsanto’s man Taylor returns to FDA in food- czar role

[Guest guest]

They are stuck in their ways aren't they. Back and

forth between the companies and the government positions. He is now in a

position where he can legislate the poisons developed whilst

working for Monsanto. Once that's done, he probably will go

back to Monsanto to work on the next poison scheme.

They are transparent, but not in the way which serves clarity and/or

honesty. More like predictable.

At 06:38 PM 9/07/2009, you wrote:

 

 

 

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-08-monsanto-FDA-taylor/

Monsanto’s man Taylor returns to

FDA in food-czar role

 

POSTED

11:04 AM ON 8

JUL 2009

 

BY

 

TOM

PHILPOTT

 

In a Tuesday afternoon press

release, the FDA announced that Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto

executive, had joined the agency as “senior advisor to the commissioner.”

If the title is vague, the portfolio (pasted from the press release) is

substantial—a kind of food czar of the Food and Drug Administration:

 

• Assess current food program

challenges and opportunities

• Identify capacity needs and regulatory priorities

• Develop plans for allocating fiscal year 2010 resources

• Develop the FDA’s budget request for fiscal year 2011

• Plan implementation of new food safety legislation

 

Taylor’s new position isn’t his

first in government. He’s a veteran apparatchik who has made an art of

the role-swapping dance between the food industry and the agencies that

regulate it. (The FDA’s press release highlights his government service

while delicately omitting his Monsanto daliances.) In her 2002 book

Food Politics, the nutritionist and food-industry critic Marion

Nestle describes him like this (quote courtesy of

 

La Vida

Locavore):

 

Mr. Taylor is a lawyer who began his

revolving door adventures as counsel to FDA. He then moved to King &

Spalding, a private-sector law firm representing Monsanto, a leading

agricultural biotechnology company. In 1991 he returned to the FDA as

Deputy Commissioner for Policy, where he was part of the team that issued

the agency’s decidedly industry-friendly policy on food biotechnology and

that approved the use of Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone

in dairy cows. His questionable role in these decisions led to an

investigation by the federal General Accounting Office, which eventually

exonerated him of all conflict-of-interest charges. In 1994, Mr. Taylor

moved to USDA to become administrator of its Food Safety and Inspection

Service ... After another stint in private legal practice with King &

Spalding, Mr. Taylor again joined Monsanto as Vice President for Public

Policy in 1998.

 

“Vice president for public policy”

means, of course, chief lobbyist. Monsanto had hired him to keep his

former colleagues at USDA and FDA, as well as Congress folk, up to date

on the wonders of patent-protected seed biotechnology.

 

“Since 2000,” the FDA press release

informs us, “Taylor has worked in academic and research settings on the

challenges facing the nation’s food safety system and ways to address

them.”

 

Watchdog in flack’s

clothing?

 

And somewhere along the away,

according to his erstwhile critic Nestle, Taylor had a moment like Saul’s

on the road to Damascus: the one-time company man suddenly became a

valorous industry watchdog. In a

 

 

surprising blog

post Tuesday, Nestle

declared Taylor “a good pick” for the FDA. “I say this in full knowledge

of his history,” Nestle wrote. Here’s her rationale:

 

Watch what happened when he moved to

USDA in 1994 as head of its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

Just six weeks after taking the job, Mr. Taylor gave his first public

speech to an annual convention of the American Meat Institute. There, he

announced that USDA would now be driven by public health goals as much or

more than by productivity concerns. The USDA would soon require

science-based HACCP systems in every meat and poultry plant, would be

testing raw ground beef, and would require contaminated meat to be

destroyed or reprocessed. And because E. coli O157.H7 is infectious at

very low doses, the USDA would consider any level of contamination of

ground beef with these bacteria to be unsafe, adulterated, and subject to

enforcement action. Whew. This took real courage.

 

Nestle goes on to report that

Taylor, after serving a stint as Monsanto’s chief lobbyist, became a kind

of food-safety intellectual, issuing wise papers on how the regulators

should oversee food companies. She points us to an

 

 

“excellent

report” [PDF] co-written

by Taylor, released this year.

 

That paper must be read carefully:

Given Taylor’s new status, it—along with

 

 

new

guidelines released by

the White House Food Safety Working on Tuesday—will likely serve as a

kind of blueprint for the Obama FDA food oversight.

 

Two things jump out immediately from

Taylor’s paper. First, it amounts to a forceful push to shift much more

of the burden for funding food-safety operations to the state and local

level. Its very title is “An Agenda for Strengthening State and Local

Roles in the Nation’s Food Safety System.” The paper promotes a “Joint

Funding Responsibility” between federal and local/state agencies.

 

Why is this a problem? For one,

state and local budgets are parched dry, drained by the most severe

economic downturn since the Depression. Is, say, California now going to

fund a robust food-safety platform—with IOUs, perhaps?

 

Moreover, we’ve seen the sort of

federal-state partnership Taylor promotes in action—and there have been

spectacular failures. Remember the

 

great peanut-butter

calamity of 2008-‘09, the

one that killed at least seven people and sickened hundreds? In that

case, the FDA had farmed out inspections of the offending factory to

Georgia authorities, who dutifully documented atrocious sanitary lapses

even as tainted product got distributed nationwide.

 

The other immediate problem with

Taylor’s blueprint relates to scale. A sane food-safety policy would do

two things: 1) rein in the gigantic companies that routinely

endanger millions with a single lapse at a single

plant—say,

 

a gigantic beef

company that can send out 420,000 pounds of E. coli-tainted beef from a

day’s processing; and 2)

do so in a way that doesn’t harm the thousands of small-scale,

community-oriented operations rising up in new alternative food

systems.

 

Again and again, we’ve seen

regulations designed to rein in big players actually consolidate their

market power by wiping out small players. As a recent

 

 

Food & Water

Watch report showed,

regulations that make sense for industrial slaughterhouses can spell the

end for community- and regional-scale ones. The Taylor report only

addresses this critical point once in its 80 pages: “Due regard should be

given to making the traceback requirement feasible for small businesses.”

Clearly, the small-scale producer issue isn’t a priority for Monsanto’s

man at FDA.

 

A technocrat’s tinkering

 

With the widely respected Marion

Nestle throwing her support behind the Taylor pick, I went looking for

other perspectives. I asked Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food

& Water Watch, for her take. FWW has been actively working to promote

a scale-appropriate food-safety regime that checks Big Food without

crushing small producers.

 

Lovera does not share Nestle’s

enthusiasm. “Taylor basically promotes a risk-based approach, and we

don’t think that’s adequate,” she told me. Lovera explained that in a

risk-based approach, regulators focus limited resources on areas of the

food system that pose the most risk. Sounds logical, she said, but it’s

proven difficult to predict where risk factors really lie. I asked her if

the peanut-butter debacle was a good example. Who would have foreseen

multiple deaths from a factory that produces peanut paste for processed

food manufacturers? She concurred. She added that the USDA’s FSIS

program, which oversees meat safety, has largely failed in a 10-year

effort to identify the riskiest parts of the meat-production

process.

 

Then there’s the emphasis on what

Nestle praised in her blog post as “science-based HACCP systems.”

 

HACCP

stands for “hazard analysis and

critical control point.” In an HACCP system, you identify the points in a

process that pose the most risk and “fix” the problem.

 

“That approach is really geared to

techno fixes,” Lovera told me—stuff like ammonia washes, irradiation,

etc. These procedures don’t seek to, say, keep salmonella-tainted peanut

butter out of cookies, but rather to make salmonella-exposed cookies safe

to eat. Moreover, the HACCP approach “hasn’t proven friendly to small

producers,” she adds. To see the Obama FDA appear to embrace it, she told

me, “makes us cringe.” In the end, the food safety system doesn’t just

need to tinker with the use of scarce resources, leveraged by increasing

the burden on states and localities. It needs to devote more resources to

actual inspections.

 

As for Taylor, here’s my take:

Despite massive marketing budgets, the food industry has become widely

distrusted over the last several years, with high-profile outbreaks a

major reason. “Consumers are increasingly wary of the safety of food

purchased at grocery stores,” declares a

 

 

recent

study. “And their

confidence in—and trust of—food retailers, manufacturers and grocers is

declining.”

 

The industry knows it needs an

improved safety system; technocrats like Taylor can deliver a marginally

improved food safety system while preserving profit margins and market

share.

 

Perhaps the FDA’s new food czar can

save some lives—I hope he does. It’s abominable when people die from

eating pre-fab peanut butter cookie or salad from a bag. Taylor’s

tinkerings could well reduce such disasters.

 

But what we really need is a food

safety system that takes the shit out of industrial meat and the

salmonella out of peanut butter, without dumping on small producers. And

I don’t think Taylor will deliver that—or even try.

 

=====

 

 

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this

material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a

prior interest in receiving the included information for research and

educational purposes.

 

 

 

 

 

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