WASHINGTON Five of the nation's largest supermarket chainsrevealed Wednesday that they are refusing to buy dairy products fromfarmers who have injected their cows with a synthetic growth hormone.
Jeremy Rifkin, who heads the Washington-based Foundation onEconomic Trends, said the bovine growth hormone (BGH) is geneticallyproduced to boost a cow's production by 20 to 33 percent.
Although the Food and Drug Administration has not cleared BGHfor commercial use, it has allowed companies to run limited on-farmtests. Rifkin said some of the products from those farms, primarilymilk, have been reaching consumers.
"I don't think it's a large amount," he said. "But if it isbeing sold over and over again in a small test area to the sameconsumers, it could have an impact."
The five food chains - Safeway, Kroger, Stop and Shop,Supermarkets General and Vons - said they have taken precautions tokeep products from cows treated with BGH off store shelves.
Either they have told their suppliers they will not purchasedairy products treated with the hormone or the suppliers already havegiven assurances that they are not selling the products, the chainssaid.
BGH is the first major biotechnology-derived hormone foragriculture. Field trials of it began in the early 1980s and so farhave involved some 11,300 dairy cows, less than one-tenth of 1percent of the nation's total. The FDA estimated that 1,000 cows areundergoing current testing.
The trials, required to demonstrate the effect of the product onthe animals, started after the FDA concluded that the milk producedby BGH-treated cows is "perfectly safe for human consumption," saidJohn Augsburg, assistant to the director of the agency's Center forVeterinary Medicine.
As a result, dairies are permitted to sell milk produced by cowsinjected as part of the test with the synthetically derived hormone,a protein clone of what is produced naturally in cows' pituitaryglands.
The large supermarket chains were responding to letters sentthem by longtime biotechnology opponent Jeremy Rifkin.
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