CHIBA, Japan -- John Bolton, the blunt and controversial U.S. ambassador to the UN, has promised "to advance American interests and ideals at the United Nations." During his first two months on the job, Bolton has denounced the United Nations Development Program for its "unacceptable" funding of Palestinian propaganda and publicly identified "countries who are in a state of denial" about the need for UN reform. He told a reporter that he feels "a little like Rod Serling has suddenly appeared and we're writing episodes from 'The Twilight Zone.'"
I'm having a similar experience in Japan as a member of the US delegation to a UN task force on biotechnology-derived foods. The group is a creature of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets food standards on behalf of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO).
The very scope of this exercise -- which has gone on for five years and shows no signs of abating -- makes no sense. It is concerned with regulatory requirements only for foods made with the newest, most precise and predictable techniques of biotechnology -- while exempting others made with far more crude and less predictable technologies, including irradiation mutagenesis and hybridization.
For example, the task force has selected as one of its new projects, "Food Safety Assessment of Food Derived from [Gene-Spliced] Plants Modified for Nutritional and Health Benefits." This scope of work completely ignores that past problems with unexpected food toxicity in new plant varieties -- in two varieties each of squash and potato, and one of celery -- have resulted from the imprecision of conventional plant breeding. There is a broad scientific consensus that the precision of gene-splicing makes the accidental introduction of toxins or anti-nutrients into new foods far less likely. (Note that no food modified by traditional techniques -- that is to say, virtually the entire diet of Europeans and Americans -- could (or should) meet the existing Codex standards for biotech foods.) It is rather like circumscribing for extra regulation only automobiles outfitted with disk brakes, radial tires and air bags -- and then limiting only those to a lower speed.
I've participated in these kinds of negotiations and meetings for more than a quarter-century, but never before have I had the same feeling that the inmates were running the asylum. This Codex travesty is rife with irony and hypocrisy.
First, the conference was opened by Japan's Vice-Minister for Health, Labor and Welfare, who extolled at length the virtues of biotechnology applied to agriculture and food production. However, his government has approved not a single food plant, fruit or vegetable for sale in Japan. In San Francisco, a gene-spliced, virus-resistant Hawaiian papaya costs about $1.25 per pound. Japan won't accept the gene-spliced variety, so they import only conventional Hawaiian papayas (mostly from trees that have been ravaged by the papaya ringspot virus, which diminishes their yield) -- and the cost in Tokyo is about $15 dollars a pound! (This vignette was less like "The Twilight Zone" and more like the British comedy, "Yes, Minister!")
Second, during the plenary the European Community's delegation sanctimoniously lectured the other nations on how to regulate biotechnology. Considering that biotech applied to agriculture is virtually nonexistent in Europe thanks to ill-conceived, unscientific over-regulation and intractable disagreements among European countries, this is rather like the government of Columbia instructing others on how to stop drug trafficking.