At 10:22 PM -0400 00/7/27, Adony Melathopoulos wrote:
>Has anybody ever checked the honey being imported to see if there is any
>trace of illegal drugs in the honey?
...
>Wallner, K. 1999. Varroacides and their residues in bee products.
>Apidologie. 30: 235-248.
>
>The paper states that in the US there are official residues for honey for
>fluvalinate and amitraz.
...
>Somebody else on the list may be able to provide a perspective on where
>harmonization sits today.
That is an important question. My detailed direct experience was
only the first dozen years of the NZ regulatory system for poisons, from
1979. That system has now been superseded by new statutes but the basic
relationship between industry and bureaucracy has not improved.
The main method is to set permissible levels far above prevalent &
foreseen environmental levels, so that what is actually being imposed on
people by industry could not be restricted by the permissible levels.
Perhaps the earliest famous example was the old USAEC permissible exposure
to ionizing radiation for the general public, 0.17rem/y, exposed by the
admirable Prof John Gofman.
The 'default very low' setting is a more recent twist, referred to
by Adony. These settings sit there in abstraction until some party desires
to impose higher doses. The application to do so (e.g. to raise 200-fold
the permissible glyphosate levels in Australasian food, to legitimise RRĘ
soybeans and cotton linters) can often go smoothly.
It must be added here that monitoring is scanty, and when actual
contamination exceeds permissible levels (e.g. in a NZ 'food basket'
survey) no penalty will usually result.
The general game is a charade to present an appearance of
regulation while actual pollution is not significantly curbed.
Sometimes a particular chemical, or a particular GMO, gets
spotlighted (usually these days by some ignorant PowerHarpie or Angry
Aborigine). I had the honour of spotlighting dioxin and 2,4,5-T from 1971
with Prof R B Elliott and a growing number including Greepneace. But there
were 17 subsequent years of 2,4,5-T manufacture. Such a system regulates
rather little.
I suspect the USA system is becoming more complex, arcane,
commercial, and illogical. Ours sure is.
Meanwhile the rule-fixated WTO largely keeps out of the GEF
controversy. ANZFA, created to harmonize food standards across Australia &
New Zealand, is an even rubberier stamp than ERMA, dominated by industry
claims. 'Harmonization' seems usually to mean imposing the weakest regime
on other countries, as if no nation has any right to impose more serious
restrictions than the most permissive allowed elsewhere. The effect of
this 'lowest common denominator' approach will be that the standards set by
the most corrupt govts will overwhelm those suggested by more scrupulous
societies. This mode of global misconduct encourages dangerous pollution.
What does not happen in all these varieties of charades is
regulatory action to protect ecosystems from the dangerous processes of
distributing poisons and of growing GM crops.
Gambling is *in*. Dawkins is feted as if a serious scientist. The
reputable scientist Pusztai is vilified. Prince Charles' brilliant
science-based leadership is mocked on grounds such as the size of his ears
and other irrelevant criteria.
And in all this, critics of GM are depicted as unscientific. It is
true that some of them are - and the media focus on them to the virtual
exclusion of science-based critics. But the more important truth is that
science-based conservationists on environmental toxins, and on GM, are far
more scientifically scrupulous than the PR agents who are hired to make out
that it's all OK. The further menace is scientists & medicos who play down
hazards because they want freedom to play God.
These defiances present democracy with some of its most serious
challenges.
R
-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949
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