EDITORIAL

More questions, few answers

Last month, Health Canada rejected Monsanto's application to approve its bovine somatotropin product with speed uncommon in Ottawa.

One might think that the powers that be expected all the issues stirred up by BST in the last few years to disappear. But the Health Canada decision raises more questions than answers.

First, a recap of the issue. In 1988, Monsanto applied to market its BST product in the U.S. It was approved and sales began in 1994.

Monsanto sent the same paperwork to Canadian regulators in 1989. Until last month, the application languished in Health Canada's Bureau of Veterinary Drugs while the issue of whether the drug should be used has been kicked around like a football at an Ottawa Gee-Gees' practice.

In the last year alone, senators have held extensive hearings on its approval. Health Canada scientists have decried what they described as "pressure" from their managers to approve the drug, despite concerns about its safety. Finally, two expert committees - veterinarians looking at animal health and doctors looking at human health issues - were struck to provide a third-party review of the science.

When the vets' report citing animal health concerns was tabled mid-January, Health Canada moved immediately to reject Monsanto's decade-old application.

Despite the decision, no one is backing off on the issue. Senators still plan to release a report on their findings from hearings they've held over most of the last 12 months. A coalition that includes the Toronto Food Policy Council still intends to write its own report, challenging food safety issues on the product. And Monsanto Canada is steaming ahead with its own appeal of Health Canada's decision.

It's obvious that the federal government doesn't know how to deal with the issue and fervently wishes it would go away. But farmers, consumers and drug companies deserve some answers.

Some producers would like to be able to use BST as a management tool in their operations. If the product ban remains, will it be a legitimate trade barrier, as U.S. milk produced using BST competes for access to Canadian markets? Will farmers find themselves at a competitive disadvantage?

Consumers deserve to know if the process for approving these products is sound. And drug companies need to know the process for evaluating drugs they seek to introduce to the market place.

Clearly the current process is tainted. It's time to clean up the mess. And, no, that doesn't mean Health Canada is allowed to sweep it under a bureaucratic carpet.

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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OPINIONS

Lessons to be learned from BST

For reporters who during the past nine years have covered the issue of whether Monsanto's bovine somatotropin dairy growth hormone product would be approved for sale, it has been reduced to a question of labels. Not whether BST-induced milk products should be labelled, but how to label the process and its "sort of" end in January, when Health Canada announced that a BST product will not be approved because of a report that it would cause health problems for injected cows.

Has it been a fiasco, a farce, a travesty or a comic opera? That is the question.

It certainly has not been policy making at its finest. Monsanto's vow that it will continue the struggle to win approval for the product raises the possibility that it could eventually become a "geek tragedy." The product clearly has no future in Canada. The issue is why it should be a continuing thread in the tapestry of political debate.

From the beginning, the BST issue has been a bureaucratic nightmare.

It is a product that Canada's production-controlled dairy industry has not been demanding. Dairy processors, worried about consumer reaction, have been adamantly opposed. Critics of the product have insisted it is unnecessary (although that is hardly a telling point in a country that welcomed Beanie Babies as a hot consumer item). It is a product that has been much more political than bureaucrats like to see.

There were House of Commons committee hearings, which became a forum for the critics. MPs in the mid-1990s recommended a moratorium on approval of the product. As Health Canada made its decision, senators were preparing a report that would call for more delay. Inside the Liberal caucus there is a strong sentiment against the product. In the past year, the Senate agriculture committee also held hearings that clearly were hostile to the product. Liberal Eugene Whelan and Conservative Mira Spivak were scathing in their questions about whether the product was needed and at what cost. The National Farmers Union and the Council of Canadians adopted it as an issue of American corporate intrusion into Canadian farmer choices.

BST clearly became something other than a specific product and more of a political and corporate symbol. So what was Monsanto's response? To ignore the politics of it and to insist that science was the only issue. Monsanto doggedly stuck to its script and ignored the reality. BST products have been approved in the major U.S. market. Why waste more money to have it approved in the more volatile and less commercially rewarding Canadian market? It remains a corporate mystery.

What was Health Canada's response? To act as if this was just another product application, devoid of controversy and politics. In the process, it left the impression that it was immune to politics, but found itself under attack from some of its own scientists that it was not "immune" but rather a captive of corporate pressure. When the issue was raised in the political debate, the government almost always insisted science was the issue, rather than politics. Nobody really believed it.

Then came the finale - rejecting the drug by grasping a veterinary report that confirmed side effects Monsanto has long conceded. The conclusion is that the company should accept that Canada, in this political climate, is not going to approve a BST product. And Health Canada should create a timely system for evaluating new drug approvals that is open enough to allow socio-economic arguments, as well as scientific evidence. Nine years in limbo simply gives credibility and a platform to critics of the drug approval system.
Barry Wilson is an Ottawa-based farm journalist

Reeled in - hook, line and sinker!

I still can't believe I could have been so stupid. Not once, but twice!

Not on purpose, mind you. I merely answered the long-distance call and heard a professional-sounding voice say he had some important information for Neil. When I explained that my husband was busy up in the silo, he would n't let me take a message, saying Neil couldn't reach him at his Hamilton office later. So what did I do? I yelled for Neil. Then I yelled louder.

Not very happily, he climbed down out of the silo. The caller was a life insurance salesman, and I'd given him the perfect pitch as he warned Neil, "What if you were to fall out of the silo?" Persistent to the end, he took about 20 minutes of Neil's time.

The week previous, Neil was hurrying to the barn when a well-dressed man came to the door. The familiarity with which he called Neil by name made me think they knew each other, so I let the guy in. Bad move.

The fast-talking life insurance salesman did his darnedest to make the most of an hour - when Neil didn't have five minutes. Feeling stupid and sorry enough to want to remedy the situation, I explained that we already had insurance, but if he would give me a schedule of premiums, I'd compare them and get back to him. This fellow was bold: He wanted to see our existing policies, and left only after we set up an appointment. Luckily, he left his card so we could phone and cancel. Even then, he took up another half-hour trying to change our minds.

In all fairness, I suppose my radar was in a dormant phase, lulled there by the absence of siding salesmen at our door. You see, last August - after painting our 2,500-square-foot house ourselves twice over the years, and fixing the roof and a couple of windows when the mood struck - we finally got a contractor to polish everything off. Siding, windows, the works.

With that renovation came deliverance from home-improvement pitches and, it seems, in just a few short months the loss of my ability to scent a salesman.

Of course, not all sales people are bad news. Our corn dealer grows crops that validate his credentials year after year. He looks after us before, during and after the deal. At times he's almost too good, coming by at breakfast one morning to prove a point with some stalks he'd cut from a field of ours. Poor Neil thought no one would notice the tiny strip where he'd run out of spray on some rented land and didn't want to come all the way home and back for more!

Our feed sales agents are wonderful sources of information, too, going over the feed analysis - even locating a used grain bin. We can count on our dairy supplier to be here at the same time each month. Our Gencor rep, meantime, calls ahead with his expected time of arrival.

Still, there are some undesirables. One fellow has repeatedly followed me into the driveway - even on Christmas Eve day as I was unloading holiday groceries. And when word got out that we were in the market for a tractor, salesmen would appear out of thin air, following us around at 7 a.m. as we tried to feed sileage. It was at that point that I worried about Great Aunt Ada's saying, "One before breakfast, three before night," but it hasn't come true yet.

I think our good friend, Cathy, has the right idea. As on many another occasion, first one, then another feed salesman interrupted she and her husband, Joe, as they did the morning chores. Then neighbors arrived, wondering what all the traffic was about. Cathy, a busy lady who also has an off-farm job, quickly got ready to go out and do some errands, telling them: "There's the coffee, boys. You're on your own!"
Margaret Comfort partners a family dairy farm in St. Catharines