An odd smell was coming from the kitchen. Sweet. Mysteriously meaty. Caramelising in butter. But it wasn’t fish. Or chicken. Or steak. Or any of Mum’s Dutch concoctions. What was it?
Dad was flipping something in the frypan. It was unusual to see him at the stove during the week.
“What are you cooking Dad?”
“Brains Petra. We’re having brains for dinner!”
“Brains! Ewe”. I looked at Mum.
“YUCK! Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck!” Mum scrunched up her face in disgust. Her body contorted and shivered with revulsion.
I’d never eaten brains before. They didn’t sound appetising either. Going by Mum’s reaction, I didn’t think I wanted to. The ones Dad hadn’t cooked yet were translucent, and filled with white channels that looked like fat white worms had crawled through them, had eaten their innards out, and were still in there, quietly digesting.
In another bowl, a cluster of brains was soaking in water, “to extract the blood”, Dad said. I watched on as he carefully separated the lobes with his long fingers by removing the white central cortex in the middle.
“They’re a bit fiddly”
Someone had slit the lambs throat so its brains wouldn’t be shattered with skull shards, which is what happens when a little lamb is shot in the head. Then someone sawed the end of the skull off by hand, and, using their manly little pinkie, nursed the soft organ out of the brain cavity to which it was clinging, being ever so careful not to squash it all into a pile of mush.
Mum pouted. “I’m not having brains for dinner”.
“Why not?”
“They’re slimy and mushy and yacky and UGH!”
“All the more for me then”.
Dad was chirpy.
“What about you Petra?”
“Um. Is there anything else we can eat? What are you going to have then Mum?
“Oh, I’ll be fiiiine” Mum assured us with a snobbish European version of ‘not-happy-Jan’ written all over her face.
But I was hungry, and it smelt good enough to get my mouth watering.
They looked okay too when they turned up to the table, wobbling like jelly. Crisped on the outside and dripping in black butter, lemon, parsley and capers. I was familiar with the saucing; it was the same we often poured over fish.
I cut off a tiny crispy end bit. Yum! “I’ll have more Dad”.
As my tongue closed in around a larger piece, I froze. The inside felt uncooked. It was ‘slimy, mushy, yacky and UGH’. Exactly like Mum described. And ceramic white when it found its way out of my mouth and all over the dinner table in a lumpy spray. My sister was gagging.
Dad was snickering, in sadistic kind of way.
He loved his offal. Liver, brains and kidneys. Tripe and sweetbreads. The recommendation of the day by Women’s Weekly was to, “ Serve them often. In addition to their good taste, they are a rich source of nourishment at a low price”
Mum hated them all. She’d rather be vegetarian than eat offal. Couldn’t stand the smell. Couldn’t stand the preparation. Not like gravy beef – where you just throw the meat into the pot, sear it brown in butter with onion and garlic, bung in some nutmeg, salt, pepper, and cloves. Cover with water and boil for ever until the meat falls apart and is all flavoured up with its own fat.
Offal required surgical preparation before cooking. Long enough to realise what you are preparing. Long enough ask yourself questions like, I wonder if this lamb preferred to have its brain in its skull? How was this lamb killed? Was it scared? Did other lambs hear its screams of terror? Was the lamb crying for Mummy? Did it have brother and sister lambies? How fearful would the other lambs have been? Why am I eating this innocent animal?
One day Mum went on housewife strike and refused to cook offal anymore. Hence Dad at the stove. Since I loved steak and kidney pie, but Mum and my sister didn’t, when Dad wanted one, the culinary task fell upon me. Preparing shiny slippery kidneys is as fiddly as prepping brains, in that you need to remove the skin, the fat, and the hard core, before cooking.
Lamb Kidneys Beef Kidneys
Steak and kidney pie kidneys come from an Ox: they are tough and need long simmering, along with the sinuous fatty meat it is being stewed with. My sister used to pick the kidney bits out of the pie while Mum sat at the dinner table scrunching up her nose in loathing as she tucked into snails and garlic butter. My sister and I couldn’t really fathom that either. Fancy eating unctuous slime oozing snails, which, when cooked, had the texture of rubber tyres?
Mum did enjoy the richness of liver, fried simply in butter, salt and pepper. Like kidneys, liver skins have to be removed first. Liver pan gravy is rich and flavoursome. My favourite was chicken liver pate, a puree of simmering butter, onion, garlic, thyme, brandy, nutmeg, butter and cream. I made it as often as I could convince Mum to buy chicken livers, and generally polished the pate off in a couple of days.
When it came to tripe, and heart, my sister and I joined Mum and quivered with disgust while we watched Dad shovel them down and wondered what we were having for dinner. Baked beans on toast probably. Tripe is the stomach of any ruminant animal. Tripe can come from sheep, goat or pig. Dad ate honeycomb Cow tripe, stomach two of the cow’s four stomachs.
The fourth stomach of the cow is also called the rennet bag, which is where cheese makers get rennet from to make cheese with. Humans don’t eat this stomach. This stomach is the one cows regurgitate their cud from. It feeds into the small intestine.
Tripe stinks of a dead animal and tastes of septic sludge if not washed properly. No matter how thoroughly I bleached that reticulum to get the cow’s last dinner out, it still tasted like vomit to me.
Another of Dad’s favourites was cow’s tongue. Cow’s tongue looks a lot like something ‘adults only’. A giant adult. I hadn’t yet seen any adults only, much less a giant one. Yet it still felt somehow pornographic to handle, had I have known what porn was. Once the Ox tongue has been cooked for nearly three hours, you then peel the outer skin off to reveal the smooth pink inner organ underneath. Like a circumcision. Only of the entire organ.
Bone marrow was okay though. Finally, something we could all do in unison at the dinner table. Suck on bones. Sucking the marrow out of oxtails and the veal bones of Osso Bucco, and the top of the BBQ’d T-bone steak, out of the smoked pork ribs in pea soup, the sinuous connective tissue between bones. Slurp, slurp, suck, suck. Mum would draw on her bones with the same enthusiasm Dad would exhibit while melting the sheep pancreas around his taste buds. Neither of my parents hid their enjoyment of food from their faces.
Dad would say, “Now children, this is something you must never do at the dinner table”. Then he would pick up his plate, and with a tongue stretched out as long and as wide as the ox’s I’d been circumcising, he’d clean the plate better than our spanking new 1970’s dishwasher did.
We were big fatty salty meat eaters growing up, and I am miraculously still alive. Dad would buy a half cow and a half pig off a local farmer. He’d take it to a butcher to carve up into different cuts. It was a whole of family activity to portion five of each into freezer bags ( one for us, two for Dad), label, and carefully order into the deep freezer - of the size humans often hide murdered bodies in, in movies, and in real life too. Hence, we also got the offal. And everyone else’s offal. One shouldn’t waste a perfectly good cow. If Dad had use for the hide, he would have taken that bit with him too.
But brains, they were his favourite.
He preferred lambs’ brains. They are smaller than cows’ brains, which win hands down over sheep’s brains were they to compete for the most hideous looking.
Beef brains are eaten in many countries around the world but are barely eaten in Europe anymore. They have even been banned in Germany since 2001, because of what the British, and others, were doing to cows for quite some time.
What were they doing to cows for quite some?
They were feeding dead cows to living cows.
Feeding dead animals to livestock began in Europe in the 19th century, but by 1920 it was commonplace to feed abattoir waste, including bone meal, and the carcasses of sick and injured animals, to pigs and poultry as a protein supplement. During World War Two, milk and beef was in short supply, so the British started feeding abattoir waste, including sheep brains, to sheep and cattle, in order to increase production. Between 1960 to 1980, in a profit driven deregulated market, Britain doubled the amount of dead animal waste it fed to its sheep and cows.
A cow would not naturally eat another cow, if it came across a dead one in the paddock.
A cow is a herbivore. A cow enjoys daises, clover, magic mushrooms, and to leap high and joyously across green grassy meadows, chasing butterflies to the end of the distant rainbow, on hills alive with the sound of music.
Knowing cows would need some convincing to eat their own kind, abattoir waste was disguised as something cows might recognise as tasty. Referred to as ‘ruminant materials’ in food labelling regulation, the British animal feed industry didn’t tell anyone what was in their new ‘beefed up’ cattle feed. It was a ‘trade secret’. They called it ‘protein’.
Protein. A cow version of Solient Green
Seems no-one really bothered to ask if British farmers had turned their cows into cannibals. Not even organic farmers. As long as profits grew. And grew.
Higher up in the trophic level, eating your own kind never ends well. Hardly ever.
Lower down the food chain, cannibalism does happen. Especially in aquatic ecosystems where, apparently, at some point up to 90% of species engage in some form of cannibalism in their life cycle. The trick is to recognise your own family and not eat them. Some species are still struggling with this, like stickle back fish. Whereas the spadefoot toad tadpole seems to know not to eat its brothers and sisters.
Sexual cannibalism is where one eats the other shortly after having sex, usually it's the reproductive female doing the eating otherwise sex would be pointless. There are parents who eat their babies, like sand tiger sharks. Salamanders have a few extra embryos hanging around for the strongest kid salamander to eat while it grows. Others eat just the extra eggs because they are hungry.
While it is usually a stop gap measure deployed by a species for short term survival, more often than not, cannibalism results in lowering the expected survival rate of the species as a whole. Reptiles and amphibians can get diseases like sarcocystis and iridovirus; insects can come down with granulosus virus, Chagas Disease, and microsporidia; and crustaceans can get stained prawn disease, white spot syndrome, helminthes and tapeworms. Not nice.
Higher up the food chain at the mammal level, in sheep, cows, deers, squirrels and humans for example, cannibalism is a DISASTER. Disaster in the form of a transmissible disease and death caused by a prion, a misfolded protein that behaves much like a zombie does – if zombies were real. It bumps into other healthy proteins similar to itself, then instructs that healthy protein to fold up and become a ‘zombified’ prion, until an army of zombie prions have taken over their hosts nervous system and kills them.
Like Kuru, the cerebellar dysfunctional prion disease found among the Fore tribes of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The Fore practised endocannibalism or necrophagic funerary cannibalism, to free the deceased spirit and return the dead relative's life force home. Until it was banned when the practise was linked to the spread of Kuru. It was mostly women and children of the Fore who ate the brains of their dearly departed. Serendipitously, Fore men thought eating dead human brains would diminish their powers in battle, so if at all, they ate muscles to increase their strength.
Kuru is a human, fatal and transmissible neurodegenerative disease, a form of spongiform encephalopathy. It destroys the brain. Even though cannibalism was banned in Papua New Guinea in 1950, there was a significant outbreak of Kuru in the late 20th century, supporting the theory that the disease has a long incubation rate and symptoms may not appear until decades later. Or, that long held spiritual beliefs and cultural practises are hard to eradicate.
Research traced Kuru back to one single individual who lived on the edge of Fore territory in around 1900, and who is thought to have spontaneously developed some form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.
Kuru Case Zero.
One theory points to the group sharing of infected prions that allowed the disease to spread, not the act of cannibalism itself. Probably not something we should be telling people because cannibalism is just not on. Unless you are a rugby team stranded by Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 for two months in the Andes mountains, in winter, with no-one coming to rescue you very soon.
Kuru symptoms include a broad-based gait and decreased motor activity control, tremors, difficulty speaking, the inability to stand, eat, or maintain bowel control. Victims develop chronic wounds, lose consciousness, starve, and die within three months to two years of the onset of the diseases.
Much like the neurodegenerative disease the British were suddenly seeing with their cows in the mid 1980’s.
Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, deregulation went full throttle and a terrible thing happened to British cows. They began to behave abnormally. They had trouble walking, were spreading their legs wide just to stay upright, and lost weight rapidly. Their brain cells were dying off in massive numbers over the course of their degeneration in a type of Swiss cheesing of the brain. Within two months of the visual onset of the disease, the afflicted cows perished. British farmers had seen this before, with sheep, when they got a disease called Scrapie. In the US, they’d seen Wasting Disease in deer.
At first, the British thought the disease jumped species from sheep infected with Scrapie, to cows, which had been fed infected sheep. But that wasn’t the case. This cow disease was new. It was named Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow Disease.
From 1986 to 2015, more than 184,000 cattle were diagnosed with mad cow disease. The British meanwhile had exported the contaminated ‘zombie protein’ in beef exports, and infected cattle stock all around the world. And because countries like the USA have more relaxed regulations around what qualifies as ‘safe for human consumption’, a few thousand more cases resulted from importing infected American cows.
An estimated 400,000 cattle contaminated with Mad Cow Disease entered the human food chain in the 1980’s, with the peak of new cases occurring in 1993. Mad Cow Disease has been confirmed in cattle born in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K.
Thankfully not in Australia after all that offal we ate growing up!
The British ran an enquiry which found:
"This problem has arisen as a result of the practice of feeding ruminant materials to herbivores, which are thus exposed to infective risks against which they have not evolved any defences. Such practices are a feature of modern intensive agriculture, but inevitably ... they open up new pathways for infection to the farmed animals and potentially from them to man" ( Southwood Report in 1988).
The Southwood Report recommended to stop feeding cows to cows and sheep to sheep. Or cows to sheep and sheep to cows, etc.
Just stop making cannibals of herbivores!
But it was already too late.
Freezing, heating or cooking doesn’t destroy the zombie prion. Our digestive enzymes do not kill the prion either, so the disease jumped species, straight from cows, onto our dinner plates, and into our bodies, as predicted.
It took a while for the prion to show up in humans due to its slow developmental phase. Ten to twenty years. When it first did in 1996, diseased humans, like cows, began to behave abnormally. They had trouble walking, were spreading their legs wide just to stay upright. They lost weight rapidly. Like cows, they died a horrible death shortly after diagnosis.
They had the human version of Mad Cow Disease. vCreutzveldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). V stands for a variant of the existing, but rare, Creutzveldt-Jakob Disease.
We had seen this before with in Papua New Guinea, with Kuru.
One hundred and seventy-seven cases of vCJD have been ‘recorded’ in the United Kingdom since the 1990’s outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, and 50 cases in the rest of the world up to the year 2014. Three cases of vCJD occurred in people from Ireland, Canada, and the USA, who had lived in, or visited, the UK, and had eaten a zombie prion hiding in their steak.
One mouthful of prion contaminated beef was all it took.
“BSE is the first man-made epidemic, or "Frankenstein" disease, because a human decision to feed meat and bone meal to previously herbivorous cattle (as a source of protein) caused what was previously an animal pathogen to enter into the human food chain, and from there to begin causing humans to contract vCJD” stated Jonathan D. Quick, M.D., Instructor of Medicine at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
A Frankenstein disease.
A man-made epidemic.
An unnecessary man-made catastrophe.
Killing humans indefinitely into the future.
Born of greed. Stimulated by exponentially growing human populations with purchasing power, wanting beef, and wealthy countries wanting to eat beef every day. Several times a day even.
With the announcement of a new Frankenstein vCJD outbreak there was panic across Europe. The British were asking themselves: how did this happen and why now, when we’ve been doing this abominable cannibalistic thing to animals since the turn of the century, with no consequence?
It is a pretty grotesque disease to unleash on cattle and humans around the world, so the British went on the defensive: we British could not have possibly done something so evil. Alan and Nancy Colchester, professors of neurology at the University of Kent, proposed in the 3 September 2005 issue of the medical journal, The Lancet, that it was India’s fault. They sent us Brits cheap bone meal mixed with vCJD-infected human remains scooped up from funeral pyres along the Ganges River and elsewhere, which had been poorly rendered with abattoir waste. We were just feeding cows to cows. The Indians were feeding dead Indians to cows, and then feeding dead Indians to us British, via their cheap bone meal we fed to our cows, which we then ate.
The real Soylent Green
The Indian government denied the accusation claiming it 'absurd'. India had not had a single case of either BSE or vCJD she claimed, and "scientists must proceed cautiously when hypothesising about a disease that has such wide geographic, cultural and religious implications".
Native Indian journalist Maneka Gandhi, writing in the Statesman in 2018, claimed there are many cases of vCJD resulting from Indians eating Indian beef, and that India is pretending Mad Cow doesn’t exist. She noted the Indian government denies the existence of any animal disease at all like tuberculosis and leukaemia, much less Mad Cow. She wrote:
"Look at the condition of the cattle that go for slaughter. Seventy-five per cent are downer animals – those with disease, injuries, pregnant, unfit to eat, gangrenous. Their conditions are exacerbated by the way they are transported in overloaded trucks. When they arrive at the slaughterhouse, most cannot even walk out. They are dragged out of the trucks. Many are already dead. The vets are supposed to reject downed animals according to the law. But there are no vets in slaughterhouses. They sit at home and are paid vast sums by the butchers to sign meaningless pieces of paper stating that the animal was well and the meat is fine. There are no labs in slaughterhouses and no laboratory technicians to check whether the animal had any communicable disease. The blood and the bones are taken to filthy factories nearby and mixed and ground into bone meal that is fed to other animals, many of whom are vegetarian.
These are called High Protein Pellets.
This process of grinding up diseased, dead animals for feed or fertiliser is called “rendering”. India has thousands of rendering factories.
How can our government say that India is free of BSE when we have never tested a single cow for it? We denied having foot and mouth disease when, last year, thousands of cattle had it. We sent exports of meat contaminated with foot and mouth — knowing that it is also a zoonotic disease. We know that our cattle have brucellosis, which, in humans, translates into tuberculosis. Do we check our slaughtered animals for that? No, we deny it. Do we check our cows for bovine leukaemia, a disease that millions of cattle have been acknowledged to have in every country and which translates into human cancer. We don’t even allow our vets to even raise the issue.
Cows affected by BSE show progressively deteriorating behavioural and neurological signs. An increase in aggression, reacting excessively to noise or touch, losing the inability to coordinate muscles, a drop in milk production, refusal to eat and lethargy. Hundreds of our cows, buffaloes, sheep and goats have these symptoms. But our vets are not trained to recognise these symptoms as BSE. There are no proper veterinary hospitals in rural India (two rooms without light and water, in Pilibhit), no labs to test the brain even for rabies. No wonder we say our cattle are healthy."
Gandhi concludes India’s bovine meat export industry is huge, and that any admission of disease would destroy the industry. So, the Indian government and its (elite) medical establishment do not test for Mad Cow Disease.
Gandhi's article did not address the Colchester's claim that humans remains are being used to make high protein animals pellets for domestic and international markets. If this was so well known in the UK, did anyone question at the time why the British would import such animal feed from India? I twice requested a copy of the Colchester paper from the Lancet but it requires the Colchesters to permit its release to me and by the time of publication, they had not done so.
After much denial and ‘cause unknown’ declarations by the British Government, it was eventually settled that the trigger for the outbreak of BSE was a change in the way meat products fed to cattle were processed, or 'rendered' by the animal feed industry during the 1970’s when they used lower temperatures to save money during the oil crisis. The official BSE inquiry (published in the year 2000), suggested that the UK outbreak "probably arose from a single point source in the southwest of England in the 1970s".
A single source went onto infect hundreds of thousands of cows.
Cow Zero.
But the disaster did not stop at just consuming beef.
It turns out that workers in the cattle and horticultural sector could get vCJD from inhaling meat and bone meal when using it as fertiliser, and diabetics could get vCJD from bovine insulin injections, and patients could get vCJD through cosmetic treatments, and through surgical sutures derived from French bovine materials, and by contaminated surgical equipment, and in human growth hormones given to babies born small, and customers could get it in face creams containing collagen, and cooks could feed you vCJD contaminated pana cotta via the gelatine contained in it.
And vCJD can be transmitted by blood transfusions.
Currently around the world there are variations on permanent bans on donating blood if you lived in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Western Europe, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia, for a minimum of 6 months or an accumulative period of 5 years, from between 1980 to 1996. In New Zealand this resulted in ten percent of New Zealand's active blood donors at the time becoming ineligible to donate blood.
Sperm donation from Europe is also banned which killed the popular, tall, blond haired, blue eyed, Swedish 'designer baby' industry.
And it gets worse.
Prions are not destroyed by cooking, fire, freezing, disinfectants, sterilisation procedures or ionising radiation. The prion remains viable at temperatures over 600 °C. They can only be destroyed by denaturation, for example, incineration at a temperature of over 482 degrees C for four hours, no less in time or temperature. Or in an autoclave, at 132 °C and 21 psi for 90 minutes. Prohibitively expensive for large numbers of cows. Much of it is all over the place in paddocks, in soil, and in grass, because that's where cows peed it out, got sick and were disposed of.
Zombie Prions Are Forever.
Mad Cow is a true Frankenstein disease.
There were warnings. An alarm bell was rung back in 1979 by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which said: "The major problem encountered in this recycling process is the risk of transmitting disease-bearing pathogens to stock and thence to humans."
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in charge of this monstrous "recycling process". The reviled Margaret Thatcher, head of the conservatives. The Tories. The party with a record of undermining environmental and social regulations.
Thatcher refused to implement risk mitigation recommendations resulting from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
The British beef industry and all those who died, paid for her reckless negligence. Many more will continue to pay the price with their lives in the future.
The whole world banned British beef and live cattle imports. Over 4 million British cattle were incinerated. The EU banned British beef for 10 years: from 1996 to 2006. Russia banned British beef for 16 years. Incredibly, the British objected to the ban and even sued the EU. Everyone else’s health around the globe being far less important than the profits of British beef exporters. Restrictions remain in place today for beef containing "vertebral material" and for beef sold on the bone.
France continued to impose a ban on British beef long after the European Court of Justice had ordered France to lift its blockade - while France was busy covering up its own BSE and vCJD scandal. Seven French citizens died of vCJD disease which supposedly didn’t exist in France, along with Mad Cow, government health officials told the public.
Britain banned almost all BSE-sensitive beef parts (brains, spinal cords, offal, etc.) for human consumption in April 1990. It took six years for the French government to make the same decision (July 1996), once again with some serious exceptions, like guts for sausages. France also underreported French BSE cases, estimated at 4,700-9,000 cows.
France only banned meat and bone meal for cattle, which ran the risk of cross-contamination through improper cleaning of machines producing food for different species subjected to different sanitary standards (beef, poultry, pigs, etc.), through human errors, or through outright fraud.
In the UK and the US, slaughterhouse tissues that are part of the central nervous and lymphatic systems, such as the skull, brain, spinal cord, nerves, tonsils, ganglia in the skull, intestines, and eyes of cattle, are classified as ‘specific risk materials’ and must be disposed of by rendering, natural exposure, incineration, burial or composting, on-farm, or in an authorised landfill.
As we have seen, none of these kill the prion. How many farm fields in Europe and around the world are contaminated with killer prions?
The USA, whose cattle industry is worth nearly one trillion dollars to the U.S. economy, as much as six percent of the country's GDP, have only partially prohibited the use of animal by-products in feed. While they have banned by-products of ruminants being fed to mammals, these potentially BSE contaminated ruminant materials can still be legally fed to pets or other livestock, including pigs and poultry ( called ‘restricted material’ in Australia on your livestock feed bag). Which is really where it all started in the UK at the turn of the 20th century.
The USA did not learn from the British experience.
In 2003 the USA announced it had Mad Cow Disease and sixty-five nations implemented full or partial restrictions on importing US beef products because of concerns that US testing measures were insufficient. As a result, exports of US beef declined from 1,300,000 metric tons in 2003, (before the first mad cow was detected in the US) to 322,000 metric tons in 2004.
The 65 nations who banned US beef were right about the USA's lax testing regime as the black angus producer, Creekstone Farm, found out.
When Japan banned the import of American beef, Creekstone Farm reported losing a third of its sales as a result and had to fire 150 staff. So Creekstone decided to test every single cow for BSE, at the cost of $20.00 a cow. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which controls the sale of BSE testing kits, refused to sell Creekstone enough kits to test all of its cows. The USDA’s official position was that testing 1% of slaughtered cows, which is still the current testing regime in the USA, is enough to assure public safety.
One percent.
A first judge ruled against the USDA in favour of Creekstone. But the USDA appealed this decision and reversed the lower court's ruling. It ruled that under an obscure 1913 law, the USDA had the authority to restrict sales of BSE testing kits, allegedly to protect other producers from being forced to conduct the same tests to stay competitive. Observers noted the decision was more likely due to pressure from large American agribusiness.
