�But many scientists inside and outside the government warn that the epidemiological data remain the same: Several hundred studies have shown that higher levels of arsenic in drinking water lead to higher levels of several types of fatal cancers.

�`If the EPA wants to debate how much money should be spent to protect people against a significant risk of cancer from the water in their taps, that is a legitimate issue,� says Michael Kosnett, a University of Colorado medical professor who served on a National Research Council subcommittee that found high levels of bladder, lung and skin cancers caused by tracer amounts of waterborne arsenic. `But I don�t hear any scientific doubt about the dangers of arsenic in drinking water by anyone other than the stakeholders.�

�Many of the stakeholders, including water districts and municipalities across several Western states, the upper Midwest, and New England, expressed gratitude yesterday to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman for canceling the previous administration�s move to lower the arsenic standard by 80% to 10 parts per billion from 50 ppb. Ms. Whitman�s decision restored the 50 ppb. Standard in effect until three days before Mr. Clinton left office, pending further EPA review of the science, she said.

�Arsenic, leached from rocks, occurs naturally in well water across wide swathes of several Western states, including Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and California. It is also prevalent in the Michigan peninsular and other parts of the upper Midwest as well as in New Hampshire, scientists say.

�In Oakland County, Mich., several people have been diagnosed with acute arsenic poisoning, says Ruth Johnson, a Republican state senator from the area. Many of them drink wells below the EPA�s 50 ppb.�s standard.

�Several industrial groups lobbied vigorously against the lower arsenic standard, including the Waterworks Association and the Wood Preservers Institute, and the National Mining Association�.

It is a shrinking world under Globalisation these days, and in some respects the mighty US is not all that far away from Bangladesh.

�from Economic Reform, May 2001

Dig Up the Roads

Local economies will prosper only by cutting their global links

George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 29th May 2001

Had the ministry of agriculture set out to spread foot and mouth as far and wide as possible, it could scarcely have done a better job. While refusing to vaccinate susceptible livestock, it has been carting diseased corpses through unaffected zones. Two weeks ago, MAFF officials in Devon botched their slaughter of a herd of bullocks so badly that the animals stampeded, breaking through the fences and spreading foot and mouth to another twelve farms.

At the beginning of the month, the disease arrived in north Somerset, allegedly on the boots of a farm worker who had been attending a training course in Devon�s foot and mouth epicentre, which the organiser had forgotten to cancel. The organiser was, of course, the ministry of agriculture. The course � which proves, I think, that there is a God after all � was on vaccinating farm animals.

So it isn�t hard to see why some people are claiming that the spread of the disease through Britain is a government conspiracy. The obvious flaw in this theory is that it credits the ministry with both a coherent strategy and the capacity to implement it.

But we shouldn�t be too hard on MAFF, for though it�s incapable of pursuing a programme, it does at least possess an objective. As it first revealed in 1999, the ministry wants to cull all but a handful of British farmers. The Labour manifesto confirms that the government will use the opportunity provided by foot and mouth to accelarate its human slaughter programme.

MAFF argues that �consolidating� the industry into a few enormous farms will help farmers to compete in the global economy. For some time I�ve been arguing that this makes no sense at all. Our tiny islands are being pushed into direct competition with million-acre grain farms in Canada and Russia, and million-sow hog cities in North Carolina. British farming will survive only by re-capturing local markets.

Labour�s manifesto appears, implicitly, to recognise this, when it maintains that �the economic hub of a rural area is often a thriving market town�. But joined-up government has seldom been New Labour�s strength. What the party of both globalisation and devolution refuses to accept is that globalisation favours the centre at the expense of the margins.