By Sourish
Bhattacharyya
THE Directorate
General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has banned the import of foie gras into India under an order that
was published in the Gazette of India
Extraordinary on July 3. Animal Equality, an international animal rights
group, at once issued a statement saying its campaign against foie gras, which focused on gavage, the method of force feeding corn
to ducks and geese to 'engorge' (bloat up) their livers, had influenced the DGFT's
decision.
 |
| The voices against foie gras are getting louder, but its critics have not been able to garner substantial scientific evidence in support of their shrill opposition to the delicacy. |
By listening only to animal rights activists, the DGFT may
have shut its ears to voices of reason. The official action, moreover, raises a
bigger concern. Is it one of those periodic expressions of food xenophobia,
which led, for instance, to a ban on lamb imports for 12 years before it was finally
lifted some time back because of the singular efforts of the Australian High
Commission? Or have our decision-makers been overcome by a serious concern for
animal rights? The entire non-vegetarian diet is based on some form or other of
cruelty to animals. Will the DGFT keep banning imports of meats, meat products
and offal whenever some animal rights group or the other raises an objection? If
such actions keep yielding the results desired by their protagonists, there may
come a time when we'll be denied our daily glass of milk because a growing
number of people believe that denying a calf its mother's milk is sheer
cruelty.
OK, this may be an extreme argument, but bans such as the one
just put in place will only encourage unscrupulous operators from selling foie gras under other names. Certain Chinese
entities, in fact, are said to have mastered this rather fine art! It's just
like our authorities are prepared to turn a blind eye on beef being served in
hotels and restaurants, despite the ban on cow slaughter and on the imports of
beef and beef products, just because the 'offending' meat is listed as
tenderloin!
The use of foie gras
has been embroiled in controversies since the late 1990s, although, unlike the
shrill animal rights, there's thin evidence to prove that the birds suffer as
much as their defenders claim they do. As I gathered from Wikipedia, although the
89-page report of the European Union's Scientific Committee on Animal Health
and Animal Welfare on 'Welfare Aspects of the Production of Foie Gras in Ducks
and Geese', adopted on December 16, 1998, concluded that gavage is "detrimental to the welfare of the birds", it
could find only "small" evidence of any injury caused by the feeding
method.
The American Veterinary Medical Association's House of
Delegates, the accrediting body of veterinary medicine in the US, was more
categorical after a series of hearings and farm visits. "Limited
peer-reviewed, scientific information is available dealing with the animal
welfare concerns associated with foie
gras production, but the observations and practical experience shared by
HOD members indicate a minimum of adverse effects on the birds involved,"
the accrediting body said in 2006. The view, predictably, is shared by foie gras producers. Michael Ginor, owner of Hudson Valley Foie Gras and author of Foie Gras ... A Passion, claims his
birds come to him to be fed and says this is important because "a stressed
or hurt bird won't eat and digest well or produce a foie gras."
Nevertheless, Wikipedia informs us, the animal rights
activism on foie gras has had a
deleterious effect on its production and consumption across the world. The
number of European countries producing foie
gras has halved to five -- Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Hungary and Spain --
since 1997, because of production bans in place in 14.
California has made the production and consumption of foie gras illegal, so has Argentina, and
Israel has been seeing a groundswell against farms producing it. Chicago's City
Council, on other hand, pushed through a ban, but withdrew it in 2008 after the
city's then mayor, Richard M. Daley,
rubbished it as the "silliest law" every passed. Chefs, too, have
been divided by foie gras. Anthony Bourdain is a fan of it, but top
chefs on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Wolfgang Puck and the late Charlie
Trotter in America and Albert Roux in the U.K., have voluntarily dropped foie gras from their menus.
The jury on foie gras
is divided, so a ban on its imports is not just a cruel blow to its aficionados,
who like to have it in any which way possible, but also a move that smacks of irrational
decision making being given a pseudo-humanitarian gloss.
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