U.S. rice exports to Haiti have unhealthy levels of arsenic, study finds
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
Summary of bes method (PBA): pre-boil for 5', remove water, add fresh water, then cook rice normally.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S00489697203687...
People use both of them. The old style one for heating dishes or making soups, because it is simple to control manually. The new style one for cooking rice, because it taste better and much unlikely to mess up like old style one.
Source: I am a Taiwanese, and you literally see both of them in every home here.
My understanding was that aresenic was the reason for any cancer warnings.
https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/healthprotection/resources/...
The recent lead contamination in apple sauce made me glad we have the FDA, but also wonder if the FDA is doing enough. I've ran across some political conspiracy theories about doing away with the FDA and similar organizations, and I think I should appreciate the FDA while I can.
But also, why did it take a bunch of kids getting lead poisoning for the FDA to find that apple sauce had a lead problem? Systematically testing products from the stores seems like a low hanging fruit, one of the simplest and most effective means of regulating the food supply. Is this not happening? What is the FDA doing that is more important than performing regular checks of the food in stores for contaminants?
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but if rice commonly does have unsafe levels of arsenic, I'm not confident that anyone will say or do anything until it becomes a tragedy.
Certain political stances think that companies are the best people to curtail their own behavior. That inspections should never be done by the government.
That no sane company would ever chase short term profit and stock price, over going bankrupt in 5 years, because they killed 1/2 their customers.
So the FDA hasn't the budget to do random pulls I suspect.
Of course, if you think of how many products are on grocery store shelves, pulling and testing 100k? 200k? products a week would be a budget indeed.
It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety.
That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg
So the way the FDA (and most regulatory agencies in the US) works is by researching what they believe to be safe and then requiring companies agree to only use those methods/components. If a company does something else, they are required to provide evidence that they believe it is safe. The FDA then evaluates the provided evidence, rather than e.g. running labs/experiments/etc themselves.
This drives numerous issues. For instance one is a 'generally recognized as safe' exception that allows companies to add entirely new components to their foods without even notifying the FDA. [1] Genetically engineered foods are another big one. A genetically engineered e.g. potato is, from the FDA's definitions, just a potato. And so it there's no further regulatory oversight or safety testing done whatsoever. The only thing they offer is a voluntary 'plant biotechnology consultation program.' [2]
[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/wh...
[2] - https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/how-gmos...
Also I think your variable naming is a bit off. Restaurants aren't generally considered manufacturers.
---
"The FDA’s overall foods program is distinct in several respects from the agency’s other public health regulatory program areas. First—with the exception of food and color additive approvals and premarket notification for certain foods—foods under FDA jurisdiction, whether produced within or outside the United States, do not require premarket approval. Thus, the foods program overall is generally a postmarket program."
---
The FDA does spot testing of high risk foods but otherwise relies primarily on corporations to simply promise that they're following the regulations that the FDA publishes. That's how you get things like lead in apple sauce - it's not something the FDA is going to be checking for. By contrast, they would likely test something like chicken, coming from a region that had a recent bird flu outbreak, for contamination.
Kidding aside, I really think that a more... "European" for lack of a better word... attitude would do us a lot of good in the US when it comes to food. Our bottled water is full of plastic, our rice and brassica are loaded with heavy metals, and a lot of our food just sucks. Our dairy is sub-par unless you buy the very high end, our meat varies wildly, and you never quite know what you're getting.
> White basmati rice from California, India, and Pakistan, and sushi rice from the U.S. on average has half of the inorganic-arsenic amount of most other types of rice.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187853521... (ctrl-f American)
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...
> In comparison, the American rice accumulated the highest arsenic concentration (mean 0.257 mg kg−1) followed by the Thai rice (mean 0.200 mg kg−1), the Pakistani rice (mean 0.147 mg kg−1), the Indian rice (mean 0.103 mg kg−1), and finally the Egyptian rice (mean 0.097 mg kg−1).
So the lowest is Egyptian rice?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187853521...).
Arsenic levels (mg/kg) in raw rice from different countries
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Arsenic-levels-mg-kg-in-...
That said, few people trust China to provide good numbers/testing/pro-active enforcement for consumer safety. They are good about applying very tough penalties (including personal executions/death penalty for corporate officers) after quality issues reach a certain level of public outcry. But most issues involve slow poisoning, don't directly kill/maim anyone, and don't reach any level of public outcry, so they go unenforced.
What constitutes a dangerous level of arsenic in the diet is controversial. First, arsenic is an essential micronutrient similar to selenium, and with a similar toxicity profile. There isn't much science to support the notion that the trace levels commonly found in food and water represent a health risk. Second, the recommended arsenic thresholds set by the government were the product of efforts by environmentalists to make opening new mines impractical by setting the standard below background environmental levels for many types of mining. This was sold under the theory that "arsenic is toxic at any dose" but per the first point, it clearly isn't.
tl;dr: There was a lot of motivated reasoning and not much science behind the food and water arsenic recommended safe levels, and several regions of the planet are subject to significantly higher background levels with no ill effects. You definitely don't want to go out of your way to consume arsenic -- it is toxic at some dose -- but much of the discussion around the level of risk is misleading.
Given that, is this a concern domestically? Is it a concern for my toddler?
While everyone is focused on rice, the other major bio-accumulator is brassica vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Many parts of Asia consume large quantities of both plants daily as staples, which suggests that the risk is low in practice.
I wouldn't say that's typical of most American households though. Ever heard of the Standard American Diet?
I think the people are trying to figure out if arsenic levels in rice will be a problem for them specifically, not our population as a whole. When they say “is that a problem here?” they mean “is the rice I am buying here of concern if I eat a lot of it?”
Nearly every meal I have has rice.
https://publicintegrity.org/environment/arsenic-levels-in-gr...
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/11/arsenic...
Obviously, this assumes that if Haiti doesn't import bad rice from the US, their calories per capita would decrease or cost per calorie increase, which isn't necessarily the case. Also obviously, we should do everything we can to decrease arsenic content for healthier food.
It's akin to the problem of our housing standards and regulations that are so high, that we struggle to build low cost housing that satisfies code, so instead tons of people end up living on the street.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
There are cooking methods to remove arsenic from rice. Simplest method is to use a coffee percolator to run fresh hot water through the rice. The other way is to boil the rice in lots of water for five minutes, discard the water, then add fresh water and cook until completed.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2F1MDzyW55pg97Tdpp...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221345301...
So Haiti has nothing whatever to do with the root problem.
And the headline forgot to mention the added bonus of toxic cadmium in U.S. rice.
I’m a biologist. I worry about these differences. Many things we measure in our bodies are reported in “fold change”, we plot things on logarithmic scales, things go 10x, 100x before we call them “active”.
The same happened in my house, I had the lead contenting of the drinking water measured. It was 1.5 (something) - in the green. A fried does it: 2.7, orange. He is recommended to flush his pipes at the start of each day.
I just can’t help but feel very weird about these very small differences between “safe” and “alarming”.
How about you all?
And this isn't to convince you that your water is "safe", but lead is excreted up to a threshold, and beyond that, it can begin to accumulate in bones and teeth, which is a rate. If yours is below the amount you're likely to consume over the given period that accumulation is likely to occur, then guidance says you should try to reduce it somehow to minimize the probability of long term health effects.
I don't think either of you are at risk for acute toxicity from your water levels, so you could think of it like calories; you're fine with your current caloric intake, but should you double it? Diet lead, that classic taste.
I agree that the EPA or FDA cutoffs give a false sense of risk. If an acceptable limit is set at 50 ppm, then 49 ppm will pass and 51 ppm will fail. The actual biological impact between the two? Impossible to measure. Hell, the instruments and sampling technique used in testing likely have an accuracy of +/- several ppm.
If one were a god who could, with the snap of a finger, replace the country's entire population with an equal number of people, randomly sampled from a rich, diverse country (say, Canada, but any other rich, diverse country would do), how would the poor country's fortune change, if at all, over the course of a generation?
---
[a] According to the World Bank, Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/haiti/overview
Yes, assume they maintain their current experience, education, and general attitude towards each other.
They'd basically need to be sent with an army to have a chance, and even then, they'd probably set up some ethnic enclave.
Highly recommend a watch if you haven't seen it already. Saw it yesterday and really gave a new perspective to international aid.
I’d say this is the least of Haiti’s problems right now, as virtually nobody there is expected to live long enough to develop any cancer or long-term heart disease.
It is common to grow rice, test it, and if it fails a test, then you sell it into another market where the test thresholds are different.
However, this is unethical because safety thresholds are set imagining that different samples of a product will have different levels of contaminants. It is assumed that buyers will eat from different sources randomly.
However, if some sellers are picking which country they sell to based on test results, then a market with a slightly higher safety threshold will in fact be flooded with much more contaminated products, on average. And the people will suffer as a result.
FDA and USDA are occasionally the testers (like for PFAS) and always the arbiters, but it's the individual members of the self-regulated farming and import organizations who are responsible for getting the testing, and only the high level aggregate reports are published, I believe. Look up lab testing services - it's a big business, and they're required.
You're also asking a question that you probably aren't aware of the scale of. US ag is huge and time sensitive. It's a miracle it works, and its systems run on the labor of millions. By the time that processed seasonal Starbucks muffin gets sold, the various parts of it have travelled farther than most Americans will in their entire lives.
Deflection, projection, denial, minimizing concerns, semantic debate with near-zero, statistically insignificant levels of reading comprehension, blatant racism, ignoring the fact we've known this since 2007, etc, etc.
And this is a 'well-educated' crowd, with full access to the information needed to come to a better conclusion literally a click or two away.
But now I just feel sorry for both Haitians and Americans because they're probably eating the same bad rice.
He said some of it comes from run off at chicken farms where they use arsenic to give the meat a better color.
This seems like a very strange way for a research paper to talk about chemical analyses. The Reuters article doesn’t cite the paper directly, but it’s here [0].
I note from their paper that rice from all non-Haitian origins, not just the US, contained what they describe as worrying levels of arsenic. I’m also confused by their (mislabeled) graphs attempting to suggest that the levels are routinely harmful. Those graphs all seem to reflect people whose bodies weigh between 8 and 20kg each eating 1.5 cups dry = 300g dry = 1kg cooked rice daily.
That seems like a lot of rice for a baby to eat, but I don’t know what’s normal. What’s more, their graphs seem like they’re saying both local and imported rice would largely fall below the “cancer risk” threshold they show on one set of graphs, and both largely exceed the “non-cancer health outcome” thresholds they’re interested in.
To top it off, in their conclusion, they mention that they know they’ve been measuring the wrong thing all along: they’re measuring total arsenic levels, while the standards they use refer to concentrations of inorganic arsenic. The EPA says that organic arsenic is nontoxic and harmless. [2]
> By measuring only total arsenic levels, our measurements do not exactly correspond to thresholds set by Codex and the U.S. FDA, which are based on inorganic arsenic concentrations.
A quick look at other widely-cited experimental research suggests that around 40% of the total arsenic in US rice is the harmful, inorganic kind [3]. And the remainder of the total arsenic count is the nontoxic organic kind.
Which suggests that if the researchers at hand had measured the thing that was actually harmful, instead of including harmless things with a similar name, they’d find that all the rice in question was below the worrisome thresholds, even for the small humans they’re worried about.
I wonder if the same policy agenda informs the rest of the editorial decisions at the “Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.” A causal glance suggests an activist kind of flavor [1], but I don’t have much of a baseline on norms in the “food justice” discipline.
[0] https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/vie... [1] https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj [2] e.g. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/documents/ar... [3] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es802612a
I was really hoping that the academic writing trend where you call everything “violent” had died around 2021, but apparently it’s still with us!
> In a violent act against the Haitian people, the US halts export of low cost rice, leading to mass starvation and food insecurity.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
'Paul O'Brien of Oxfam America says the lessons of the harm of flooding a country like Haiti with subsidized rice should have been learned a long time ago.
'"The days are gone when we can throw up our hands in terms of unintended consequences; we know now what these injections can do to markets," he said. "The question we want asked is what is being done to guarantee long-term food security for Haitians."'
'[...] there is plenty of malnutrition.
'Some 2.4 million Haitians — out of a population of nearly 10 million — cannot afford the minimum daily calories recommended by the World Health Organization.'
'But donors often sink more money into emergency aid than such long-term projects.'
'Before the 1970s, Haitians only ate rice once or twice a week, getting starch from other local staples like sorghum and manioc, Woolley said.
'Today, rice is a staple but often U.S.-subsidized rice costs less than locally grown crops. On Friday, a 55-pound bag of US rice cost about $36, compared with $60 for the same size sack of Haitian rice.'
'In the 1970s, fearing indigenous pigs could spread swine fever, the United States — in conjunction with USAID — moved to replace all of Haiti's hearty Creole pigs with pigs from Iowa. The end result was the fragile U.S. pigs often became sick, preferred expensive feed and had fewer litters.'
'[Haitians need] cheap credit, cheaper fertilizer and more government aid, he said.'
From dict.org
2. Injury done to that which is entitled to respect, reverence, or observance; profanation; infringement; unjust force; outrage; assault. [1913 Webster]
Could you please cease doing violence and not think those thoughts?
(/s This is sarcasm - the second line obviously references Doublethink. The example is meant to point out how ridiculous it is that thought is being shut down by accusing people with an expanded/changed definition of violence)
But the broader point is that whenever you have a strong and weak entity interacting, you can always find a way to frame anything the stronger entity does as "violence".
Not sharing your wealth and power? Violence by indirectly causing suffering with your hoarding.
Sharing your wealth and power? Violence by harming the weaker entity's ability to take care of themselves and be independent.
At the end of the day, some armchair critic is always going to accuse the stronger/wealthier party of violence, so accusations of such lose their meaning and people increasingly ignore the boy who cried wolf.
Correct. While it's a bit crude term than the historical "inquitable", it accurately describes trade surpluses being lost to the weaker party compared to a more equal exchange. This is why BATNA is an important principle.
Is Fr*nce going to invade?
Giving people money for food raises the prices of food. Giving people free food ruins the people selling food.
A starving population is an economics problem, rarely is it a commodity shortage.
If you want to distort an economy you have to do it intentionally and with great care with an eye for helping it grow.
For example, look at what they already import from your country, buy it from your own producers and then sell it at a deep discount, but watch out for who else sells it and if you'll distort any other exporters markets.
Look at their needs for capital equipment, especially where efficiency is involved and sell it to them cheaply, again paying attention to not trample existing markets.
Many more examples but in essence pay attention to the consequences of your actions, don't just focus on one and ignore the rest.
The best ways to help countries and communities out of poverty is through quality education and eradicating the endemic corruption.
Throwing aid and free money at that corrupt and broken system, won't fix anything.
It just perpetuates a cycle of systemic addiction where the people/society depend on your aid to function and are therefore under your control.
In your case, yeah, eradicating corruption might solve the issue, but that’s something that has eluded the entire human race since time immemorial. So in the meantime while we work to solve the human equivalent of an NP Hard problem, let’s help people out.
...other than calling it "violence". If there's no use of force or threat thereof, it shouldn't be called "violence".
In this case, free rice is having the effect of price dumping. You can't compete with free, so local agriculture and cuisine is being wrecked, and diets are changing for the worse.
Another example is the distribution of so-called mitumba, where, say, ragpickers from New Jersey ship tons of used and second hand clothing to Africa, destroying the local textile industry. This, and intentional Chinese tactics (and probably American, among others), is how, for example, Nigerian cotton and textiles were destroyed.
If you want a country to flourish, often it's a matter of fucking off and letting it develop. Investment is good, of course, as long as it's done on the basis of a partnership between labor and capital, not taking over and pumping and dumping competition so you can effectively colonize the country economically. Unregulated free trade is always promoted by the powerful, as they can easily swoop into developing economies and entrench themselves before the local industrial base even has a chance to establish itself.
But “destructive” and “violent “ aren’t synonymous. Its not nitpicking at all.
Tenebrism, from Italian tenebroso ("dark, gloomy, mysterious"), also occasionally called dramatic illumination, is a style of painting using especially pronounced chiaroscuro, where there are *violent contrasts of light and dark*, and where darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tenebrism&oldid=8...
Everyone agrees, but Haiti is essentially in perpetual crisis.
If you have to pick between economic harm and starvation, people are going to pick economic harm.
Nearly any time a country that has figured out how to produce something in a scalable fashion for cheaper (including shipping), it will wipe out local alternatives.
It doesn’t matter to the local competitor if it’s being subsidized by a foreign government, it’s just as “violent”.
It’s stupid to replace “cant compete” with “violent” when there are a lot of actual examples of competition where real violence is involved (mafia).
Economic violence is a real thing.
And selling rice with internationally illegal levels of arsenic and other toxins is violent too.
What is complicated about that?
There are two things in discussion:
- the “economic violence” of food relief programs because it makes it hard for local farmers.
- high arsenic levels in US rice
Both are perfectly valid uses of the word violent.
Stunned that people are defending this tbh. American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.
>Stunned that people are defending this tbh.
It’s frankly shocking that you think deriding the author for calling food programs “economic violence” is defending this scenario. Take a step back and realize that multiple things can be wrong at once.
Do you consider cheese exports from France to be economic violence against Wisconsin?
But if France was knowingly shipping arsenic-laden cheese to the US in a way that displaced the local economy to the degree that the only available cheese is poison? That'd, at least, cause some violent diarrhea.
You either don’t understand the meaning of “bike shedding” or you think one small portion of the economy struggling to compete on the price is “violent”. Either way, I think you’re confused about the definition of something pretty fundamentally.
If it was really the choice between, “you’ll get poisoned and have violent diarrhea if you eat this cheaper option” or “keep buying the previous local option”, both options would stay available.
So the point you tried to make really missed the mark. The way that arsenic rice could crush the local market is only if it had essentially no near to mid term side effects. If it was obvious people wouldn’t buy it.
You’d have to prove intent to call it violence. Seems more like negligence. Its also puzzling why someone would assume an intent to harm in this scenario .
Are we supposed to believe no one involved in selling this massive amount of rice knows what we learned in 2007 [0] ?!
> At one point during the reign of King Cotton, farmers in the south central United States controlled boll weevils with arsenic-based pesticides, and residual arsenic still contaminates the soil. Today, rice paddies cover fields where cotton once grew, and a large market basket survey published in the 1 April 2007 issue of Environmental Science & Technology now shows that rice grown in this area contains, on average, 1.76 times more arsenic than rice grown in California.
'Negligence' is not the word for this. It's violence, and it's inexcusable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre
There aren't many instances in history where people are actually systematically exterminated on the grounds of their race, so Haiti is of historical significance.
Nobody bats an eye at the reprisals that follow when the slavers win.