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We’ve all grown accustomed to the steady parade of television ads—$3 billion year worth, by some estimates— urging us to “ask our doctors” about the latest miracle drug. Pharmaceutical ads have been commonplace since the 1990s, after the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the way for prescription drug companies to aggressively market their wares directly to consumers.big money.
It’s been about a year since I accidentally stumbled on Elanco’s ENOUGH Movement campaign. Curious as to why a corporation that pushes animal drugs would spend millions on a consumer campaign, I “joined” the movement.already produce enough food to feed the world. And as research conducted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has clearly shown, to achieve global food security we need a “rapid and significant shift from conventional monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production toward mosaics of sustainable regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers.”antibiotic resistance. In the U.S., at least 2 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria every year, and at least 23,000 die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In October (2015), mainstream business press got wind of Elanco’s ENOUGH Movement. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Andrew Martin wrote a piece exposing the campaign, and its near-evangelical spokesperson, Jeff Simmons, president of Elanco. Martin wrote:
Simmons is on a counteroffensive. Increasingly, the drugs Elanco makes—including antibiotics and productivity enhancers—have come under attack by food activists and, in some instances, scientists and regulators. Food companies and fast-food chains are responding to consumer demand for healthier, more natural food that doesn’t contain some of the drugs that have made Elanco a $2.3 billion business.
Elanco, the animal-health division of the pharma giant Eli Lilly, makes one of the world's most controversial growth-promoting chemicals for meat production: ractopamine, marketed as Optaflexx for cattle, Paylean for pigs, and Topmax for turkeys.more vulnerable to heat. Ractopamine is banned in the European Union, China, and more than 100 other countries, and it faces mounting criticism here in the United States.
So controversial is ractopamine, that according to PoliticoPro, China recently agreed to resume imports of U.S. pork from six processing plants and eight cold storage facilities, only after those plants and facilities pledged to not to process hogs raised with ractopamine. PoliticoPro quoted a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) official as saying: "This will allow a greater share of U.S. pork and product exports to China in the coming months." BloombergBusinessweek his message is this:
...that a minority of pushy elites—vegans, organic die-hards, and GMO-bashers—is keeping vital technology from farmers, that animal protein is a crucial source of nutrition, that unleashing innovation would allow farmers to produce enough meat, milk, and eggs to meet demand without draining additional natural resources.
To which we say, hogwash. And ENOUGH, already.Katherine Paul is associate director of the Organic Consumers Association.
