Activism: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
by Henry I. Miller
Posted May 29, 2009
Activism can be a good thing. Libertarians and civil-rights advocates lobby for constraints on undue government intrusion into our lives, and professional associations further the interests of its members. We benefit from getting to shop in the marketplace of ideas; but all is not good-faith, constructive activism, and some of the goods in the marketplace are shoddy.
A recent example was the trumped up claim by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of radical consumer and environmental groups, that Johnson & Johnson's baby-care products contained cancer-causing chemicals. In response to these charges, first made on the organization's Web site on March 12, a 3,500-store supermarket chain in China pulled the products from their shelves and Chinese regulators began an investigation. To the credit of the regulators, the charges were dispatched within a week, and the products are once again available. But some taint will linger on for a company that enjoys a 69% market share of baby-care products in China.
Whether the reason for such irresponsible behavior is ignorance of the principles of toxicology or an attempt to intimidate or extort money from companies, such false alarms do real damage to companies' reputations and to the public's understanding of the risk of consumer products and activities.
There are many examples of public misapprehensions fueled by misinformation from a variety of sources, including self-styled public interest groups and the large segment of the media who don't let facts get in the way of a good story. A tragic example is environmental activists opposition to the spraying of pesticides to kill insects that carry disease. The spraying of any pesticides let alone the possible resurrection of the use of DDT, which has been banned in most of the world for several decades—is often greeted by near-hysterical resistance.
Since the banning of DDT, insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue have been on the rise. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria alone kills about a million people annually, and that there are between 300 million and 500 million new cases each year.
The regulators who banned DDT and the activists who oppose its return ignore both its relative safety and the inadequacy of alternatives. Because it persists after spraying, DDT works far better than many pesticides now in use, some of which are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms.
When it comes to the nexus of activism and public opinion in China, there is a kind of yin and yang. On one hand, NGOs that espouse views contrary or uncomplimentary to government doctrine are not tolerated, so the country is largely immune to the misrepresentations and machinations of groups such as Greenpeace, Consumers International and Friends of the Earth. Although in much of the world, gene-splicing technology, or genetic modification (GM), has been subjected to a relentless, decades-old campaign of lies, over-regulation and even vandalism, China has not experienced those problems. As a result, gene-spliced, pest-resistant cotton is now dominant in China, and papayas, sweet peppers, tomatoes, petunias and poplar trees have all been approved for commercialization. China currently ranks sixth in the world in the cultivation of gene-spliced crops and grows more than 100 times as much of them as all of Europe combined.
On the other hand, responsible activism could help to remedy the shortcomings of product manufacturing and its regulation in China, which have become a kind of poster-child for irresponsible, lethal tampering with food and drug ingredients (to say nothing of lead paint in toys and poisonous toothpaste) intended for export. The lengthy list of incidents includes melamine deliberately added to an ingredient in pet food that sickened and killed cats and dogs in various parts of the world; diethylene glycol, mislabeled as non-toxic glycerin, mixed into anti-fever medicines for children, which killed at least 100 in Panama; the contamination of precursors of the blood-thinning drug heparin with another chemical, that caused hundreds of allergic reactions and 19 deaths in the United States and at least 80 serious adverse events in Germany; melamine contamination of eggs produced in three Chinese provinces that caused kidney stones and renal failure in children; and widespread milk contamination with melamine that sickened more than 300,000 and killed at least six.
These debacles, which are certainly only the tip of a large iceberg, result from the decentralized, dispersed nature of many industries in China, the absence of an effective regulatory infrastructure, and the lack of appropriate incentives and disincentives that would make businesses accountable for their transgressions. As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal Asia observed: "The melamine scandal happened because of bad incentives throughout the supply chain. . . Milk collectors had an incentive to add melamine to make the milk look like it contained more protein (melamine fools protein tests). Dairy companies had incentives to look the other way—to maintain profitability and avoid scandal." Likewise, Chinese regulators and their political bosses often have found it most expedient to deny the existence of problems until the evidence becomes incontrovertible. We saw that in the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 and it is probably occurring again in the reporting on the incidence of H5N1 influenza in birds and humans.
Appropriate activism could help to redress some of the shortcomings in China's quality control and regulation. Consumer groups should apply pressure to both industry and the government to demand accountability for unethical behavior that injures the public health, and they could boycott uncooperative offenders. And if they wish to protect their brand, responsible businessmen must insist that the government provide effective and consistent regulation.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the co-author, most recently, of The Frankenfood Myth, chosen by Barron's as one of the 25 Best Books of 2004.
