| WASHINGTON
- April 21 - A trade association representing sugar growers threatened
to use its congressional allies to defund the World Health Organization
(WHO) unless it cancels the release of its report on Diet, Nutrition,
and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases. Those threats were blasted
today by the Washington, DC-based Center for Science in the Public
Interest (CSPI), which said the threats sounded more like blackmail
than legitimate lobbying.
The long-awaited
report, prepared jointly with the United Nation’s Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is scheduled to be released
in Rome on Wednesday. The report recommends diets higher in
fruit and vegetables and lower in added sugars, among other
things.
“Naturally,
the sugar lobby would reflexively oppose any suggestion that
sugar contributes to obesity and dental disease,” said
CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson. “But we’re
shocked by the bluntness of the Sugar Association’s thuggish
threats. There’s nothing sweet about Big Sugar’s blackmail
campaign, and we applaud WHO and FAO for resisting it.”
In one letter
to WHO Director General Gro Brundtland, Sugar Association president
Andrew C. Briscoe III wrote that the association would ask “Congressional
appropriators to challenge future funding of the U.S.’s
$406 million contributions” to the WHO. Attached to that
letter is a letter from Senators Larry Craig (R-ID) and John
Breaux (D-LA) to two cabinet secretaries asking them to help
quash the WHO report. That letter, Briscoe hints darkly to Brundtland,
“speaks for itself.”
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