One Sweet Mess

Incinerating water might sound like a bizarre thing to do, but it is a fair bet that Cara Environmental Technology wishes it had done a bit more of it. Instead, the respected Irish firm is part of a loopy trail that links the runoff from the production of hormone-replacement pills for postmenopausal women to the likes of German pig farmer Bernhard Finke, who spent much of last week worrying whether his pigs would ever get to market.

The unlikely chemical bond between hot flashes and slipping schedules at Europe's slaughterhouses is the synthetic hormone medroxyprogesterone acetate. MPA, as it is known, is used in pharmaceutical products for humans, both as a contraceptive and as a hormone replacement. Its active ingredient, progesterone, is given to heifers in the United States, Australia and elsewhere to make them put on weight faster. The European Union has banned it and other growth-enhancing hormones for use in livestock since 1989. So when the hormone was found earlier this month in animal feed and in the renal fat of some Dutch pigs, a hefty part of Europe's pork market came trotting to a halt. The affair conjured up memories of past food crises, such as the dioxin that contaminated Belgian chickens in 1999 or the ongoing questions over "mad cow" disease in Britain.

The MPA scandal seems to be ebbing without presenting a real threat to human health. Barring further twists in what has already been an unpredictable plot line, most of the thousands of farms placed under surveillance in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg during past weeks are likely to be back in business by the end of the month. Nevertheless, the lawsuits and investigations progressing in the wake of the MPA affair suggest it will still take lots of time and money to get this latest food aberration through Europe's nervous craw.

The MPA tale, in fact, gives disturbing new meaning to the term alimentary canal. It starts with the American pharma company Wyeth, which makes hormone-replacement pills at its plant Wyeth Medica, in Newbridge, south of Dublin. The process of sugarcoating these pills produces runoff water with sugar in it, and beginning in 1997 Wyeth paid Dublin-based waste-management firm Cara to get rid of it. Neither company will say how much they paid, but the sum was handsome enough to justify Cara shipping the sugar water to an incinerator in Denmark.

In 1999, Cara managing director Brendan Keane says Wyeth asked him whether there might be an equally economical solution that recycled the waste rather than incinerated it. "One of our contacts told us about Bioland, this company in Belgium that reprocessed sugar into lactic and citric acid," says Keane. Cara inspected the facility, found it "clean, tidy and well run," and contracted to send tankloads of sugar water across the Irish Sea and the Channel to the little town of Arendonk near the Dutch border. The companies might even have expected a little p.r. credit for recycling.

Perhaps the firms would have got it, if only they had stuck with unsullied sugar water. But in August 2000, according to both Wyeth and Cara, Bioland agreed to accept from them a new stream of waste sugar water known to be contaminated with MPA. There is still a lot of scrapping going on over who was at fault. Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency said last week that "serious errors" at Wyeth had led to the waste water being labeled as non-hazardous.

There were even bigger problems at the other end. Belgian authorities say that Bioland, owned by Dutch brothers Hendricus and Hubertus van Vught, had no license to process food products. Nevertheless, Bioland converted at least some of the estimated 200 tons of MPA-contaminated water delivered between September 2000 and May 2002 into glucose syrup. It sold the stuff to several off-brand soft-drink manufacturers keen to secure a low price on their product's single most expensive component: sugar. And it also exported the syrup, a key component for animal feed, to two large Dutch mills. The stuff was mixed directly into wet feed for pigs and used as a component in molasses, a common feed supplement. According to German investigators, some 400 tons of the tainted syrup were bought by two German feedmakers. More than 1,800 German pig farms which got their feed from one of the contaminated sources were shut down, among them Finke's operation in Steinfurt, in Lower Saxony. He is unwilling to contemplate the costs if his pigs are found to have MPA residue in them, but even if he gets an all-clear this week, he believes serious damage has been done.

But who exactly is to blame? Bioland declared bankruptcy in May. One of the brothers, Hendricus, was arrested in July on suspicion of breaching food-safety laws; his lawyer, Luc Schuermans, had no comment last week. A source in the Belgian prosecution team says the other brother, Hubertus, could not be located late last week. Prosecutors suspect other firms — including more from Ireland — may have been delivering suspicious products to Bioland. The Irish waste firm doesn't accept that it could be the main vector of the contamination. "I strongly suspect there is a hell of a lot more MPA scattered all over Europe than Wyeth ever sent," says Cara's Keane. "We were shipping 200 tons a year to a plant with a 10,000-ton capacity."

Belgian prosecutors are also wondering whether European farmers' interest in the waste might be less for the sugar than for the hormone. Indeed, it may be more than mere coincidence that the contaminant is, of all things, a growth hormone in common agricultural use outside Europe. Just last month, an Antwerp court sentenced four men, two of them livestock dealers, for the 1995 murder of veterinarian Karel Van Noppen, who had been investigating illegal hormone use. "It's a very strange story, and we're not to the bottom of it yet," says a Belgian food-safety official.

Even as Dutch authorities began to loosen the ban on export and slaughter of pigs last week, the Dutch Farmers' Group LTO-Nederland and the Dutch feed-industry group, Nevedi, threatened Wyeth and Cara with lawsuits. "We have three member companies alone who have lost ?450,000 each because their sows were made infertile," says Jack Luiten, LTO spokesman. "Some of these firms could take years to recover." Legal action is also likely between Wyeth and Cara over whose responsibility it was to label the MPA waste as hazardous. Meanwhile, Europeans have got another bitter taste of how commerce blurs the line between waste and food these days. After the crises of recent years, that is one realization no amount of sugarcoating can conceal.