Implications of the Belgian Dioxin Crisis

The global trading community is reeling from the recent Belgian dioxin crisis, which is widely perceived as the worst food crisis since the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) episode. The steadily deteriorating genetically modified crops situation and the dioxin crisis mushroomed out of a society that is by now acculturized to distrust government regulators, academicians, and even science itself.

The Belgian crisis began in mid-January 1999, when a storage tank containing animal fat became he…