Securing food safety

食品の安全性を確保せよ

The committee, consisting entirely of private experts, has done a remarkable job. It has examined mountains of data presented by the agriculture and health ministries and has disclosed everything it discussed. The report was prepared with no help from bureaucrats. The result is an indictment of structural defects in food-safety administration.

Indeed, the report marks a milestone in the nation's administrative history, not only because of its sharp criticism of food-safety policy but also because of the way in which the investigative committee was run. "We have had a majority of people behind us," said the chairman, Mr. Masao Takahashi, professor emeritus at Kagawa Nutrition University.

Now the ball is in the court of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's administration. The task ahead, of course, is to revamp food safety administration along the lines proposed by the report, with the primary focus on consumer protection. Basically, that is the only way to restore public trust in the safety of beef and related foods. Creating an independent food safety watchdog — a key committee recommendation — is a pressing priority.

The report is a woeful reminder that the government initially had little or no real sense of crisis about BSE, much less a plan of action to prevent it. Bureaucrats failed to learn from the mistakes committed by European nations in allowing the disease to spread as it did. In other words, the government showed itself to be incompetent as well as negligent in coping with the crisis.

Japan continued to import contaminated meat-and-bone meal, the cattle feed believed to be the source of BSE, from Europe in the 1990s. So it was a matter of time before cows here contracted the disease. But no action was taken to ban the use of the feed; only nonbinding "administrative guidance" was given, meaning that cattle farmers were left to their own devices. Thus the government committed a "grave policy mistake."

Warnings from the World Health Organization and the European Union were all but ignored despite the growing need for international cooperation in disease prevention. Details of those warnings were not disclosed here. In 1990, when the number of BSE-infected cattle sharply increased in Britain, the British government sent a report to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries on its measures to ban the use of meat-and-bone meal, but little heed was given to the document.

Thus the government passed up a number of opportunities to place its own ban on the bone meal. In 1996, a government council heard an expert opinion calling for a ban, but the agriculture ministry lacked the will to take preventive action because the ministry's chief concern was to promote agriculture, not to protect consumers. Says the committee report: "Japan's laws, systems, policies and administrative organizations (related to agriculture) are legacies from the period of food shortages in which producers took precedence over consumers."

The producer-first policy was also promoted by Diet members elected from rural constituencies, particularly those of the Liberal Democratic Party. "Many legislators themselves formed powerful pressure groups to pursue producer-oriented policies," says the report, without mentioning the LDP by name. Absent is the description "LDP agricultural tribe," a reference made earlier in the draft of the report.

The BSE problem has also revealed a serious lack of coordination between the agriculture and health ministries, which followed their own separate safety policies. This is a major flaw in vertically integrated administration that must be corrected at all cost.

The proposed reforms represent steps in the right direction. These include (1) giving top priority to consumer protection, (2) establishing an integrated safety system reaching from "the farm to the table," (3) introducing risk-analysis methods, and (4) respecting advice from scientists and other specialists.

The government has its work cut out: drawing up specific reform plans in six months, as recommended by the committee, and putting them into practice without fail. In doing so, the government, from Prime Minister Koizumi on down, should listen with an open mind to what consumers and producers have to say.

The Japan Times: April 5, 2002
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　委員会は厚労省と農水省から提出された膨大なデータを検証し、審議内容をすべて公開した。報告書は官僚の手を借りずに作成され、食品安全性担当の行政機構の構造的欠陥を糾弾した。報告書は、食品安全政策批判の面でも、調査委員会の運営方法においても画期的だった。小泉政権の課題は、食品安全行政の改革を報告書の提言にそって消費者保護を重視しつつ行うことで、それが牛肉と牛肉関連製品の安全性に対する国民の信頼回復への唯一の道だ。食品安全性監視の独立機関設置が最優先事項となる。

　報告書は、BSEに関する政府の危機意識が当初薄かったことを明らかにした。官僚はBSE感染拡大を許した欧州諸国の失敗から学ぶこともなく、政府は危機対応で無能さと怠慢を示した。BSEの感染源とされる肉骨粉を90年代に欧州から輸入し続けた日本に感染が出るのは時間の問題だった。しかし肉骨粉の使用禁止措置は取られず、拘束力のない行政指導だけに終わった。

　BSE予防における国際協力の必要性が高まったにもかかわらず、世界保健機関(WHO)と欧州連合(EU)からの警告は無視された。90年、BSEに感染した牛が英国で急増した時、英国政府は自国の肉骨粉使用禁止措置に関する報告書を日本の農水省に送ったが、殆ど顧みられなかった。96年、政府の審議会は肉骨粉の使用禁止を求める専門家の意見を聞いたが、消費者保護でなく農業助成を重視する農水省は、BSE防止策を講じようとはしなかった。農業に関する日本の法律、制度、政策、行政は、消費者より生産者が優先された食糧不足時代の遺産であると報告書は述べている。

　生産者偏重の政策はまた、農業地域選出の国会議員、特に自民党議員により推進された。報告書によれば、生産者中心の政策を打ち出すため、多くの政治家が強力な圧力団体を形成したとされ、草案中の「自民党農水族議員」の記述は削除された。 　BSE問題で、農水省と厚労省の間の連携が全く取れておらず、それぞれ独自の食品安全政策を追求していたことが露呈した。これは縦割り行政の大きな欠陥であり、ぜひとも正さねばならない。

The Japan Times Weekly
April 13, 2002
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