The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reportedly agreed to fund produce safety inspections through the end of 2012 despite the government’s failure to include the agency’s Microbiological Data Program (MDP) in next year’s budgets. According to media sources, neither the Obama administration nor Congress allocated resources for the 11-year-old program, which coordinates with local officials to screen alfalfa sprouts, cantaloupe, cilantro, hot peppers, lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes for pathogens such as E. coli (STEC), E. coli 0157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes, and Salmonella. Responsible for 30 recalls since 2009, the MDP has garnered praise from consumer groups that have since decried its imminent demise while lambasting public officials for dispensing with the $5 million needed to keep the program running. “It’s a small sum of money in the government sense,” David Plunkett, senior staff attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told reporters. “For the government, it’s not…
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a final rule amending the food additive regulations at 21 CFR part 177 “to no longer provide for the use of polycarbonate (PC) resins,” including bisphenol A (BPA), in infant feeding bottles or spill-proof sippy cups. Effective July 17, 2012, the final rule apparently responds to a petition filed by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which claimed that “that baby bottles and sippy cups manufactured from PC resins are no longer being introduced into the U.S. market and that manufacturers of baby bottles and sippy cups have abandoned the use of PC resins in making these products.” After reviewing the submitted data and seven public comments addressing the petition, FDA concluded that the use of PC resins in these products has been “completely and permanently abandoned,” and agreed to amend the regulations accordingly. The agency has requested objections to the final rule…
Shook, Hardy & Bacon Agribusiness & Food Safety Practice Co-Chair Madeleine McDonough will participate in the American Conference Institute’s (ACI’s) “FDA & USDA Compliance Boot Camp: An In-Depth and Comprehensive Course on Regulatory Requirements for the Food and Beverage Industry,” scheduled for October 3-4, 2012, in Chicago. Joining a faculty of expert in-house counsel, regulatory officials and seasoned practitioners, McDonough will address “Preemption Fundamentals: Overview of Recent Case Decisions and How to Successfully Assert Federal Preemption.”
A recent study has reportedly claimed that two species of shiner fish exposed to bisphenol A (BPA) were more likely to mate in mixed-species pairings. Jessica Ward and Michael Blum, “Exposure to an environmental estrogen breaks down sexual isolation between native and invasive species,” Evolutionary Applications, July 2012. After collecting specimens from rivers throughout Georgia, scientists evidently used a controlled environment to study the effects of short term BPA exposure on both the red shiner fish (Cyprinella lutrensis), an invasive species, and the native blacktail shiner fish (Cyprinella venustra). Their results allegedly showed that males exposed to BPA lost some of their distinctive coloring, leading females to more frequently choose mates not of their own species. “Until now studies have primarily focused on the impact to individual fish, but our study demonstrates the impact of BPA on a population level,” explained one of the study’s authors in a July 11,…
Yale University Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity’s Kelly Brownell has provided a “Perspective” article for PLoS Medicine’s ongoing series about “Big Food.” Titled “Thinking Forward: The Quicksand of Appeasing the Food Industry,” the July 3, 2012, article contends that public-health efforts to collaborate with the food industry to address obesity are a mistake. According to Brownell, “The food industry has had plenty of time to prove itself trustworthy,” but because food companies “must sell less food if the population is to lose weight, . . . this pits the fundamental purpose of the food industry against public health goals.” Brownell calls for the industry to be regulated. “Left to regulate itself, industry has the opportunity, if not the mandate from shareholders, to sell more products irrespective of their impact on consumers. Government, foundations and other powerful institutions should be working for regulation, not collaboration.” Another article in the…
“The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store,” writes Times correspondent Stephanie Strom in this July 7, 2012, article about perceived conflicts of interest on the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). According to Strom, who tracks the consolidation of organic brands under larger corporations, “[t]he industry’s image—contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms—is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic.” Strom argues that Big Organic has “come to dominate” the 15-member NOSB, which determines the national list of nonorganic ingredients permitted in “certified organic” products. In particular, she claims that some seats reserved for farmers or scientific experts have gone to corporate executives or other representatives from large organic food processors with a stake in promoting their own production methods.…
The World Trade Organization Appellate Body has partially rejected the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative’s (USTR’s) appeal in a dispute with Canada and Mexico over “country of origin” labeling (COOL) for beef and pork products. After WTO’s Dispute Settlement Panel ruled in November 2011 that specific provisions of the U.S. COOL program provided less favorable treatment to Canadian and Mexican livestock, USTR appealed the ruling on the ground that COOL does not impose unfavorable treatment of imported products because it “requires meat derived from both imported and domestic livestock to be labeled under the exact same set of circumstances.” Additional details about the appeal appear in Issue 433 of this Update. In upholding the Dispute Panel’s assessment, the WTO Appellate Body agreed that “the COOL measure treats imported livestock differently than domestic livestock,” in part because it creates “an incentive in favor of processing exclusively domestic livestock and a…
University of Kansas School of Law Professor Andrew Torrance discusses in this article the promises of synthetic biology, which takes genetic engineering (GE) one step further by designing organisms from scratch, and its potential perils. Dubbed “synagriculture,” the new technology is apparently being developed by those dedicated to sharing, spreading and pooling innovative biotechnologies and eschewing patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrecy to protect inventions. Part of the Do-It-Yourself biology movement, synagriculture, according to the author, represents a democratization of GE crop and livestock development, which some contend has given agricultural companies too much control over farmers. After reviewing an array of GE legal issues, Torrance concludes, “it would be well and wise for the law to prepare itself to reexamine the brave new world of synagriculture with brand new eyes.”
The European Union (EU) General Court has affirmed a ruling of the Board of Appeal of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs) (OHIM) and dismissed the application of a beverage company to register “Royal Shakespeare” as a word mark for its scotch whiskey. Jackson Int’l Trading Co. Kurt D. Brühl GmbH & Co. KG v. OHIM, Case T-60/10 (Gen. Ct., decided July 6, 2012). According to the court, the Royal Shakespeare Co. had registered “Royal Shakespeare Company” three years before Jackson International sought to register its mark, the theater company’s mark has a reputation before the public at large and not among an elite as argued by Jackson International, and the beverage maker’s use of the mark would take “unfair advantage of the distinctive character or the repute of the earlier trade mark.”
A federal court in Wisconsin has reportedly approved a consent decree between the U.S. government a Wisconsin livestock operation that allegedly violated federal drug laws by failing to maintain adequate animal treatment records, using new animal drugs illegally and failing to adequately distinguish between medicated and non-medicated animals for sale for use as human food. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initially warned the owner of Nolan Livestock in 2004 that a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection revealed the presence of an illegal antibiotic in the edible tissues of its dairy cows. Under the consent decree, the owner must cease operations and then resume only when it has documented to FDA’s satisfaction that it has corrected the problems observed and has instituted appropriate procedures to prevent a recurrence. See U.S. Department of Justice News Release, June 26, 2012; FDA News Release, July 10, 2012.
