Clone, Clone On the Range

French researcher Pascale Chavatte-Palmer (above) says there is a rush to accept cloned farm animals and not enough funding available for necessary research.

By Alex Roslin
February 21, 2008
The Georgia Straight
[read the original story]

Since many cloned farm animals are born with abnormalities, how safe is their meat and milk?

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in January that food from cloned farm animals was safe to eat, the agency said the science was clear. Officials said meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs, and goats are exactly the same as conventional food.

“The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal so it is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe,” Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told reporters at a news conference in Washington,D.C.

In her office outside Paris, one of the world’s leading cloning researchers, Pascale Chavatte-Palmer, didn’t think the research was clear at all. Working out of the French government’s National Institute for Agricultural Research, she helps supervise one of only two or three noncorporate research facilities worldwide studying the long-term health of—and food products from—large numbers of cloned animals.

Chavatte-Palmer, a group research leader at the INRA, has found milk and meat from cloned cows are, indeed, different. “The full maturation of muscle is delayed in clones,” she said over the phone from her office 25 kilometres southwest of Paris. “This probably will affect the quality [of the meat]. It will certainly be a bit different.”

And those aren’t the only differences she’s found between clones and normal animals. In a series of papers she has coauthored in leading scientific journals, Chavatte-Palmer has reported that clones of cows reached puberty 62 days later, on average, than normal animals and they were 56 kilograms heavier when they did so. And then there were the huge numbers of clones that didn’t make it that far.

At an INRA farm whose exact location Chavatte-Palmer can’t disclose for security reasons, she has helped produce some of the world’s most comprehensive research on what happens when we try to clone farm animals. Her studies are cited 54 times in the FDA’s mammoth 968-page risk assessment on food from clones.

The idea of cloning is to create a perfect genetic copy of an adult animal by taking the nucleus from one of its cells and transferring it into an egg that has no nucleus. In about 100 of 1,000 cases, the egg develops into an embryo that can then be implanted in a surrogate mother.

Of those 100 embryo transfers, the INRA research found more than 50 fetuses spontaneously abort in the first trimester of pregnancy because of genetic or physical anomalies or defects in the placenta—a rate two times higher than for conventionally bred cows.

Another 20 or so abort later in pregnancy, most often because of a grotesque ailment sometimes called large offspring syndrome, which results in a fetus 20 to 85 percent larger than average.

In the end, fewer than five of the fetuses, on average, are born alive, Chavatte-Palmer reported in a 2004 paper in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells. This finding is in line with a European Food Safety Authority draft scientific opinion on cloning released in December 2007 that said the success rate for clone fetuses reaching term is 0.5 percent to five percent.

The FDA risk assessment offers a similarly glum, if a tad less dismal, cloning success rate of five percent to 18 percent.

But making it into the world alive is just the beginning of the struggle for many clones. Many are born with limb and head deformities, contracted tendons, extreme diarrhea, diabetes, respiratory failure, heart disease, and kidney problems.

Contrary to the sunny views of FDA officials at the Washington news conference, the agency’s risk assessment makes for sombre reading about the unpredictable science of cloning. It cites one 2000 Japanese study that painted an especially unsettling picture: “Calves [numbered] 11, 13-15, 20 and 22 died at parturition [birth] or several days later and had significant morphological abnormalities of the kidney or cacomelia [limb deformity]; the neck was bent backwards, the hind legs were stretched tightly or the second joints were bent toward the opposite direction from the normal position…

“Calf number 12 was disemboweled at parturition and the face of calf 16 was warped and the second joints of both hind legs were bent in the opposite direction from the normal position.”

This study, published in the Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, also reported on the bizarre appearance of many clone calves at birth, which “had an ‘adult’ appearance” and displayed “many wrinkles in the skin, thick bone structure, and rough hairs resembling those of adult males”.

Some of these postnatal complications are, again, caused by large offspring syndrome, which occurs in 14 percent to 50 percent of successful clone births, compared to 9.5 percent of animals produced by in vitro fertilization.

As for older clones, virtually no research on their health and longevity has been done, even though it’s been 12 years since Dolly the sheep—the first mammal cloned from an adult cell—was born in 1996. Dolly herself had to be euthanized at the young age of six after developing arthritis and lung disease.

The FDA is quite frank about most of these problems in its risk assessment. “Many questions have been raised regarding the immune function of clones and their ability to resist or recover from disease, yet few studies have examined this issue directly in bovine clones,” it says.

So how can the FDA still okay food from clones? The reasoning goes like this: yes, almost all cloning attempts fail, and, yes, there is evidence the animals that do survive are genetically abnormal. But the FDA says it hasn’t been shown that such genetic abnormalities make food from clones unsafe. “The relevance of ‘epigenetic normality’ to food consumption risks is unclear,” its report notes.

So the FDA concludes that as long as clones are pronounced to be physically healthy by a food inspector, their meat and milk are safe to eat.

The logic baffles Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Food Safety. “They have no data. The standard way to assess something like this is to do long-term studies of feeding it [cloned-animal products] to animals,” he said, speaking on the phone from his office.

“The [FDA’s] basic assumption is if an animal can walk in the door of a slaughterhouse, it’s safe to eat. I don’t know what slaughterhouses they visited. There are tremendous problems in slaughterhouses about whether we’re packaging meat we shouldn’t.”

But beyond that, it’s still an open question whether or not any clones are really healthy. The FDA acknowledges as much. Its report cites a 2004 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine by cloning pioneer Rudolf Jaenisch, the MIT biologist who created the first genetically engineered animals in the 1970s.

He wrote: “Gene-expression analyses indicate that four to five percent of the overall genome and 30 to 50 percent of imprinted genes are not correctly expressed in tissues of newborn cloned mice. These data represent strong molecular evidence that cloned animals, even if they survive to birth, have serious gene-expression abnormalities.”

In France, Chavatte-Palmer concluded in a paper last year in the journal Animal: “Cloned animals, although apparently normal, are however significantly different from contemporary controls maintained in the same conditions.”

It also turns out there’s no solid evidence for saying the meat and milk of clones really are the same as those from conventionally bred animals. No large-scale studies have been done. “Information on the composition of meat or milk from animal clones has been limited,” the FDA’s report says.

The agency explored the idea of sending some clone food for lab tests but dropped the plan because, apparently, it didn’t have access to enough sample material for a statistically valid result.

Instead, the FDA relied on several small-scale studies of meat and milk composition involving an average of five clones each. Five of the 10 studies found differences between food from clones and conventionally bred animals.

One study coauthored by Chavatte-Palmer last year in the journal Theriogenology reported statistically significant differences in vital fatty acids and enzymes in milk from clones compared to conventional animals.

Of five studies of cow meat, two—including Chavatte-Palmer’s Theriogenology paper—found significant differences in fat content, proteins, fatty acids, and enzymes between beef from clones and that from conventionally bred cows. For pork, only two studies were cited involving five clones in total, both from biotech company ViaGen. They found the clones had less back-fat thickness and meat yield than control animals, plus their meat was darker and redder.

No studies have been done at all on food from goats, the third clone species that the FDA okayed for food production.

Apart from these 10 studies, the FDA cited three others that also showed differences in clone meat or milk, but the reason may have been the varying diet of the animals.

These less-than-stellar results went unmentioned when U.S. officials spoke to reporters in January about the decision to okay clone food. “These products are not different than food from traditionally bred animals,” said Bruce Knight, the agriculture department’s undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, at the news conference. He described cloning as just “another breeding technique” that “has now been demonstrated to be safe”.

Chavatte-Palmer thinks more study is still needed. She’s no anti-biotech advocate, and she personally believes that meat and milk from clones are probably safe to eat. But she added: “I think we should know more. Our study is one of the biggest published, but it’s still limited. There is not enough data to indicate there will be no problem. We feel there is a rush to accept those clones.”

Food from cloned animals could officially enter the U.S. food supply starting as soon as a few months. The short delay is because of a temporary voluntary moratorium suggested to the industry by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—time to work out a plan to assuage the concerns of consumers in the U.S. and abroad.

The moratorium would be extended at least another year by a farm bill that the U.S. Senate passed in December requiring an outside study by the National Academy of Sciences of the safety of food from clones and impacts on human health. That bill is now the subject of negotiations with the House to reconcile different versions.

If the moratorium is lifted, clone food seems likely to slip largely unnoticed into American grocery stores without much possibility of being tracked. That’s thanks in part to the FDA’s decision not to require labels on the food or any tracking mechanism for cloned animals and their offspring.

There’s also a practical reason the food will be virtually impossible to track: there’s no way to test whether an animal is cloned or had a clone ancestor. “The answer is no,” said the FDA’s Sundlof when a reporter at the January news conference asked if such a test is possible. “These animals are indistinguishable; both the animal and any food produced from those animals is absolutely indistinguishable from any other food source.”

And despite the voluntary moratorium, food from clones has already been entering the U.S. marketplace for about 20 years, according to Donald Coover, a Galesburg, Kansas, veterinarian and owner of SEK Genetics, which retails cow semen to farmers. Coover said he himself has sold U.S. ranchers several dozen clone offspring as well as “thousands of units of semen” from clones. He put the number of other U.S. cloning businesses flouting the ban at “dozens at least, hundreds probably”.

“It’s not illegal and it’s not unethical,” said Coover, reached on his cellphone at the Iowa Beef Expo. “Instead of having just another damn horse, you have Secretariat every time. That is why it’s enormously useful.”

Coover said food from clones first entered American diets in the 1980s and early 1990s from an initial generation of clones made with split embryos. This was long before Dolly, who was cloned from an adult cell. The earlier clones didn’t catch on with ranchers because it was a crapshoot trying to predict if an embryo would turn into a superior animal as an adult.

Nonetheless, Coover said hundreds of split-embryo clones were produced, and their meat and milk quietly entered the U.S. food supply without any formal assessment of the products’ safety. “I’m not aware of any large-scale studies,” said Coover. “It just was not considered as a health or nutrition issue by the FDA.”

FDA spokesperson Brad Swezey refused comment, saying in an e-mail: “We aren’t doing interviews on cloning.”

Coover said it’s very possible some offspring of split-embryo clones also entered Canada’s food supply. “I would be stunned [if that wasn’t the case]. I can tell you for certain there was nobody up there looking at this.”

In Canada, food from both adult and split-embryo clones is banned by order of Health Canada. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which enforces the ban and monitors food imports, didn’t respond to a request for comment on Coover’s claim or how it plans to stop clones from entering the country.

Health Canada is now studying the FDA risk assessment as part of a reevaluation of the Canadian policy on food from clones.

For all the attention on food from clones, the fact is you’ll never see a clone T-bone at your butcher. That’s because clones are up to 10 times more expensive to produce than conventional animals—$10,000 to $16,000 for a cow and $6,000 for a pig. Instead, most clone food in our diets would not come directly from clones themselves.

Remember all those abnormal clones that are euthanized or die prematurely? You didn’t think they’d go to waste, did you? The FDA says their meat is unsafe to eat. However, its risk assessment says an acceptable disposal method would be to send the carcasses to rendering plants, where they would get chopped up and cooked with spoiled meat from grocery stores, dead animals from zoos and shelters and butcher-shop trimmings, then turned into pet food and human food products like lard.

The FDA cites no research on whether or not rendered food from abnormal clones is safe. “There is not a single study of that,” says Jaydee Hanson, of the Center for Food Safety. “They don’t let animals with mad-cow disease enter the food supply through rendering.”

The other big source of clone-
derived food would be the naturally bred offspring of clones. “Everything in those tissues is the same as what you’re seeing with our natural conceived animals,” Bernadette Dunham, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, told reporters in January.

But again, the FDA acknowledges in its assessment that the science is limited on the health of clone offspring or the composition of their meat and milk. The FDA risk assessment cites only two studies on pork from the offspring of pig clones—one of them from biotech company ViaGen. They found the clone offspring had less fatty acids, shorter back and loin lengths, and less bacon yield. No studies at all were cited on beef or milk from the offspring of clones. A few studies have found clone progeny tend to be born with fewer abnormalities than their parents, but there is little longer-term research on offspring as they age.

Nonetheless, the FDA concludes that any genetic errors in clones are likely “reset” in their offspring. Because of the lack of research on offspring of livestock clones, the agency cites evidence from the so-called mouse model: research on mice that suggests offspring of clones benefit from some kind of genetic reset button.

“We don’t have enough data to say that is 100-percent true,” Chavatte-Palmer said. “The mouse model has been shown not to be a good model for humans. I don’t see why it would be a good model for cows. The best model for cows would be cows.”

One of the few scientists who has looked into the health of clone offspring is Dean Betts, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Betts coauthored a pair of studies in the journal Molecular Reproduction and Development in 2005 and 2007 that found sheep and goat clones and their offspring have significantly shorter telomeres, the chromosome endings believed to control aging and susceptibility to cancer.

“It [the telomere] provides chromosomal stability. Without it, you have a greater chance of genomic instability, which leads to cancer,” Betts said in an interview from his office at the university.

Shorter telomere lengths could explain why many clones seem to age faster than normal animals. Dolly the sheep, for one, was found to have shorter telomeres. “Do they [the offspring of clones] have a possibility of shorter life spans and age-related diseases?” Betts asked. “We don’t know what it means or if it has health impacts. I would say not enough study has been done…There could be some impacts on the species itself over generations.”

Asked if he agrees with the FDA’s assertion that genetic errors are probably reset in the offspring of clones, Betts said: “Based on my study, I wouldn’t support that statement. My study would say the opposite, that they are not reset.”

Back in France, Chavatte-Palmer had high hopes she could get some answers about the health, longevity, and food of clones and their offspring. But her cloning work has ground virtually to a halt. She said grant-funding agencies have turned down most of INRA’s proposals to study the facility’s 70 clones and offspring—one of only two or three such large groups of animals at a noncorporate facility anywhere in the world.

Now money has run out to maintain a group of normal animals in similar conditions as the clones—necessary in order to have a good comparison sample, Chavatte-Palmer said.

“We have piles of data that we haven’t had time and money to get help to analyze…It’s very difficult to get funding in this area of research. Europe doesn’t want to hear about it, even though we are told it [clone food] is safe. It’s frustrating, very frustrating. I’m thinking at some point it’s best to move on to something else.”

Defects in Dark Corners

Hidden problems with how homes have been built or renovated account for growing number of court cases

ALEX ROSLIN
SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
Saturday, December 29, 2007
The Montreal Gazette

When Frederic Hore bought himself a small bungalow in Dorval, he knew there were a few things to fix up. But Hore didn’t mind. He had previously built his own house and was savvy enough with his hands to be hired in the CBC’s engineering department to supervise the tradespeople.

He inspected the house himself before he bought it in 1994 and thought he knew what to look for. In fact, even a trained house inspector wouldn’t have caught most of the problems that arose over the next years, he said.

That’s because they were what is known as hidden or latent defects—problems hidden behind walls or under floors that are difficult or impossible for an inspector to see.

“The problems only started after I moved in and the snow melted,” said Hore, 55.

One of the first things he noticed was the sagging floor in the bathroom.

“I thought, ‘This was strange,’” he said.

The reason for the sagging, he discovered, was someone had cut away two-thirds of the supporting joists that held up the floor from underneath.

Hore said he also found six layers of shingles on the roof—well over the limit allowed in the building code. The excess layers were too heavy for the roof to bear and had caused the shingles to curl, Hore said.

Other repairs included overloaded electrical circuits, a lack of insulation and rotting drywall. He estimated the total bill at $13,000—a sum Hore said would have been far higher if he hadn’t done most of the work himself.

Just as bad, he said, is it’s taken him 13 years to make all the fixes.

Hore is one of a growing number of homeowners finding themselves with hidden defects often costing tens of thousands of dollars. It’s the dark side of the real-estate boom.

“There are more and more cases,” said Michel Rocheleau, a Montreal real-estate lawyer for whom hidden defects make up 75 per cent of his practice.

“It’s without end. I start a new case practically every week.”

Jean-Pierre Deguire, a lawyer at the Boucherville firm Lecompte Deguire who acts as a court-appointed mediator in the small-claims division at the Quebec Court, is also seeing more cases. The reasons: a booming number of real-estate transactions and the fact that, in 2003, Quebec raised the maximum limit for small-claims cases to $7,000 from $3,000.

This caused many hidden-defects claimants to turn to small-claims court with their cases because, there, clients don’t need lawyers.

Deguire said hidden-defects cases today make up 60 percent of the small-claims cases he receives for mediation.

Another reason for more cases, according to Rocheleau: more shoddily built houses. Urban sprawl has pushed real-estate development onto land less suited for housing, he said, while corner-cutting developers have left some homeowners to deal with defects that become apparent only 10 or 15 years later.

The cases can involve massive sums. The biggest sources of defects are foundations (responsible for 75 per cent of Rocheleau’s cases) and roofs (making up another 15 per cent), with the average bill ranging from $30,000 to $60,000.

And that’s not including the cost of presenting the claim itself, which, Rocheleau said, averages $5,000 to $10,000 for legal bills and another $5,000 to $7,000 for hiring experts, like engineers and contractors, to testify.

The astronomical costs are a big reason Rocheleau advises clients to try to settle out of court if possible. He said half his cases are resolved that way.

Many claimants also voluntarily reduce the amount they seek in order to qualify for small-claims court so as to avoid the cost of hiring a lawyer.

Even then, however, expert witnesses can still cost hundreds of dollars. There might also still be some legal costs to bear. Rocheleau advises claimants and defendants alike to meet a lawyer for an hour or two before the case in order to prepare and make sure they understand the rules of evidence.

The reason: many home buyers and sellers are unaware of their rights and responsibilities when it comes to hidden defects, Rocheleau and Deguire both said.

The biggest mistake sellers make, Deguire said, is thinking that because they didn’t know about a hidden defect, they aren’t responsible for it.

Rocheleau said he sees this mistaken reasoning all the time.

“People often take it as a criminal allegation or a sign of dishonesty, but the defect can often be unapparent for years,” he said.

On the other hand, if a vendor did know about the problem and didn’t tell the buyer, the buyer can sue not only for the cost of repairs but also damages under the Quebec Civil Code.

For home buyers, the biggest mistake is not having an inspector or other qualified expert check out the house before signing a deal, Rocheleau said.

“Many people are imprudent,” he said. “They often buy because they fell in love (with the house), and there’s not much that can stop them.”

Quebec has no legal requirement that buyers must use a home inspector, but Rocheleau said it’s wise to do so to avoid problems later. Also, in court, the testimony of an inspector may be essential to showing a defect was really hidden.

Buyers who believe they’ve discovered a hidden defect must be able to show the problem couldn’t have been reasonably found during a pre-purchase visit to the house.

For example, if a potential problem area is obscured by material like boxes, the buyer or their inspector is obliged to move the items or ask the buyer to do so, Rocheleau said.

That’s what one house buyer wishes her inspector had done when she bought a three-bedroom house in Châteauguay in 1999.

Boxes in the basement had concealed a poorly installed electrical box with exposed wires. The buyer only discovered the dangerous wires when she called in an electrician to figure out why her circuits kept blowing.

He found not only the exposed wires but also a highly overloaded fuse box.

“You should have seen the look on the electrician’s face. It was total shock,” said the homeowner, a nurse and writer who didn’t want her name used because she wants to put the problems in the past.

The previous owner had done the electrical wiring himself. The entire house had to be rewired at a cost of $4,000, she said.

The new owner said she didn’t try to pursue the previous owner because he had left the country and it didn’t seem worth the trouble to her family.

As for Hore, he didn’t go after the vendors of his house either; they had also left the country.

“It’s almost like that movie The Money Pit with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long,” Hore said, “only I have not fallen through the stairs—yet!”

Hidden defects: What to do

Say you just bought a home and discovered a leaky foundation or shoddy roof. What do you do?

Legal experts say buyers must follow some specific steps in order to recover the cost of repairs from the previous owner: 

First, inform the seller of the defect as soon as possible after discovering it. This can be done verbally.

If you’re not satisfied with the seller’s response, you must send a registered letter outlining the claim, including an estimate of the repair cost. The seller should be given 10 to 60 days to respond, depending on the urgency and gravity of the case. Sellers have the right to get their own estimate and have the defect repaired at their own cost by their own contractor.

If there’s still no amicable settlement, you can do the repairs yourself and file a court claim to recover the costs—as well as for damages if you think you can prove the seller knew about the defect. Cases of $7,000 or less are filed with the small-claims division of the Quebec Court, from $7,001 to $70,000 with the Quebec Court’s civil division and above $70,000 with Superior Court.

In a bona fide case, the judge usually awards nearly the entire cost of repairs to the buyer, albeit depreciated in accordance with the age of the house. The seller is also usually ordered to pay the buyer’s court costs, but the amounts were set back in 1971 and often account for only 10 to 15 percent of actual legal costs.

The Fisher Kings

By Alex Roslin
Up! Magazine
Dec 1, 2007

Far from Nassau and its high-rolling tourists, the islet of Spanish Wells, near the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, is not your typical lazy beach town. That local waving as she passes, for example, is probably much richer than you are

Our first hint that Spanish Wells is a different kind of place comes when we meet Newton Curry. He is the caretaker of our colourfully painted, century-old fisherman’s cottage, who doubles as a lobster fisherman and local handyman (his slogan: “Curry Can”).

Newton has just hauled three months’ worth of luggage for our family of four from the water taxi. He cheerfully refuses our tip, then starts to leave.

“Where are the keys to the house?” I ask.

“Oh, you don’t need to lock your doors when you go out,” he says, smiling. “There’s no crime on Spanish Wells.”

No tip? No crime? Where are we, Sesame Street?

Well, the Bahamas’ aptly named Family Islands, actually. The Vegas-like carnival that is Nassau, the Bahamian capital, is a world away. Life here is as slow as fishing skiffs; golf carts and feet are the preferred modes of transport and easy friendships, generosity and relaxation are a way of life.

Spanish Wells is possibly the most fascinating jewel of these islands, and the most curious. Still blessedly overlooked by tourists, this tiny islet is accessed by a 10-minute ferry ride from the larger island of Eleuthera—which means “freedom” in Greek. The island got its name from the Eleutheran Adventurers, Puritans fleeing the English Civil War, who were the first Europeans to settle in this 700-island archipelago in the 1600s.



Many of the 1,800 people living in Spanish Wells trace their ancestry to these early refugees who ran aground on the Devil’s Backbone coral reef just offshore.

My family chose the island for our prolonged family vacation because of its quaint and reasonably priced rental cottages—US$2,500 a month for a three-bedroom gem; a brilliant history full of pirates, Civil War gunrunners and Prohibition liquor smugglers; the lack of crime; and because its small size meant freedom from a rental car.

And then, of course, there was the ocean, with its beautiful, bright splotches of turquoise, aquamarine and yellow, a fabulous three-kilometre pink-sand beach—that’s right, it’s pink, a phenomenon created when sugar white sand mixes with wave-crushed coral that's coated with algae and tiny amoebas, called forams—plus a shallow sandbar that stretches out for a kilometre.

It seemed like the perfect playground for our two little tykes, aged five months and two years. We also looked forward to eating lots of what lived in this water— lobster, stone crab, yellow fin tuna, hogfish, snapper and wahoo—all available directly from the island’s many fishermen.

What we didn’t know was what kind of reception we’d get from the people of Spanish Wells--the uncertainty fuelled by surreal tales about the mostly white, blond and blue-eyed islanders; close-knit, conservative, religious and wary of outsiders. Our Lonely Planet guidebook warned tourists to “be prepared for some frosty stares and passive displays of hostility.” Not exactly family vacation territory.

After a tiring trip—a flight to Nassau, a second 45-minute hop to the North Eleuthera Airport aboard a 19-seater Beechcraft 1900, then a water taxi to Spanish Wells, with 250 kg of luggage and two little ones in tow—the islanders put us at ease right away. Instead of frosty stares, everyone waves as they whirr past in their golf carts.

Our social calendar is soon full with invitations to dinner, kids’ plays and birthday parties, spear-fishing trips and, of course, church. It started with the first family we met on the ferry ride and kept coming when locals realized how long we were actually staying. Friendly waves to passing locals helped. (Bahamians are considered some of the most religious people in the world, with predominant Baptist and Anglican denominations, holdovers from their Puritan roots, and more churches per capita than any other country.)

Our new friends drop off lobster thermidor, guava duff (a fragrant cake-like bread) and homegrown bananas, and the gifts don’t stop when we don’t go to church. One of the Caribbean’s most famously reclusive settlements has clearly opened its doors to outsiders. We quickly suspected that the Lonely Planet author just breezed through town.

The seeds of change were planted by the lobster. Since the 1970s, when the Red Lobster restaurant chain started buying most of the island’s catch, Spanish Wells went from being a hard-luck fishing village to one of the wealthiest communities in the Caribbean. It now boasts the largest fishing fleet in the country.

Islanders like to say they count more millionaires per capita than any community in the world. This is one of the few tropical destinations where the locals are likely to be richer than most tourists—one of the reasons there’s no crime. (Our doors are never locked, which results in people leaving gifts of food in our fridge while we’re at the beach.)

But the lucrative lobster trade is only one part of what makes Spanish Wells crime-free and unique. Despite their wealth, the “natives,” as they call themselves, dress modestly and profess a huge pride in being a humble and neighbourly sort of people .

“The minute a tourist starts to think that because they have money, they can look down on the people here, that don’t work,” says Abner Pinder, who quit life as a fisherman to become the island’s chief councillor (the Bahamian version of a mayor).

***

Pinder is an embodiment of the modern, changing Spanish Wells. His other hats include real estate agent, owner of a fleet of golf carts-for-hire and shipping agent for the Bo Hengy fast ferry, the catamaran that departs from Nassau daily for Harbour Island, stopping in Spanish Wells along the way.

He is one of the island’s most prosperous citizens and friends with two of the country’s recent prime ministers. Yet, he still retains the air of the simple fisherman. He spends much of his days steering a heavily laden forklift around the docks, dressed in his trademark blue work pants and shirt.

Pinder’s attitude to tourism is typical here. “We love tourists, but we don’t want too many,” he says in the island’s curious Old South-meets-Jamaica brogue. “We don’t want our way of life to change. We don’t have to change because 95 per cent of the people in Spanish Wells are independently well-off. If Bill Gates comes here, he’ll be treated the same as you.”

But Spanish Wells has already seen a sea change in recent years. The island has a growing number of interracial families, and about a quarter of the students and teachers at the island’s school are black—a result of growing acceptance of “non-natives” and the influx of Haitians working in the area. We ask some black Bahamians who live and work on the island about racism, and they say there’s been healthy improvement in attitudes toward all “non-natives,” black or white.

But not all the change is for the better. Tourists have started sniffing around the island and buying up the charming cottages, many of them a century old. The “natives” hope to cash in on a US$13.6-billion resort-and-condo boom that is transforming this former British colony. Perry Christie, the past prime minister, called the planned projects “the largest direct investment of foreign capital in the history of any country.”

Some Bahamians complain the building mania is turning them into second-class citizens in their own country. Land prices have skyrocketed, making homes unaffordable for many locals.

On Spanish Wells, the real estate boom has been a mixed blessing. While it has no doubt helped the islanders warm up to outsiders, it has also caused property prices to nearly triple in the past six years, from $4 to $10 per square foot and from $10 to $30 for waterfront properties. Even with their incredible incomes, young families are finding it harder to afford a home.

Many are nervously eyeing t he largest of the development schemes, which is planned for privately owned Royal Island, just five kilometres southwest of Spanish Wells. Over the next few months, major construction is to begin here on an exclusive $500-million villa-and-marina project, complete with five-star boutique hotel and the first of a new line of 25 Jack Nicklaus Golf Clubs. Completion is scheduled for 2009.

While some Spanish Wells residents welcome the project, saying it will have a spillover effect on land values and bring a flood of tourists, others fear it for the same reasons. They worry newcomers will overrun their sleepy enclave and increase pressure on a fishery already suffering from illegal poaching by Bahamians and other Caribbean nations, as well as poverty and lack of government monitoring.

So far, however, mass tourism has bypassed Spanish Wells. Entire days go by without a single person to wave to on the entire three kilometres of pink (yes, pink!) beach. No Sea-Doos or parasailers mar the tranquil waters. No trinket-sellers hassle us while we search for conch shells, starfish and turtles along the sandbar. Even the stunning, world-class reef at Devil’s Backbone rarely sees visiting scuba divers, leaving the angelfish, groupers and parrotfish to enjoy the dozens of shipwrecks undisturbed.

For the warm-blooded locals, the water is too cold until it hits sauna-like temperatures in the summer. (“How kin you go in that watah?” they demand. “It’s freezin’!”) And the tourists, well, they’re off swarming the nearby über-rich enclave of Harbour Island and the casinos of Nassau. With no bars or nightlife in Spanish Wells, the streets are usually as quiet as Tombstone before a gunfight.

Some days, it seems like a shame our special little island remains overlooked. But most of the time, we bask in our own, secret discovery.


Bahamas ’ Dirty Secret

Haitians are the dirty little secret of the Bahamas. While this country and its tourism industry depend heavily on the estimated 30,000 to 80,000 Haitians living here (many of them undocumented) for cheap labour, they live in a virtual police state.

The U.S. State Department’s latest human rights report, the Country Report on Human Rights Practices released last March , slammed the Bahamian government for discrimination against the country’s largest immigrant population and fostering anti-Haitian prejudice . Haitians have a hard time getting citizenship. Even their children born in the country can only apply for citizenship when they turn 18, and then often wait years for a reply.

On Spanish Wells, about 200 Haitians work as gardeners, construction workers and labourers. By Bahamian standards, the island has a fairly good reputation among Haitians. Still, none wanted to speak with a journalist, even anonymously, for fear of reprisals by Bahamian authorities.

Jean-Pierre, who lives on nearby Eleuthera, tells a typical story. He lives in a Haitian shantytown with no running water, where people typically earn $30 to $45 a day while the cost of living is similar to Canada’s. He arrived more than 20 years ago on a work visa, and had three children, all born in the Bahamas. To date, no one in his family has citizenship.

Twice in recent years, police came to his door at 4 a.m. and, despite his work permit, took his family to Nassau for questioning, along with dozens of other Haitians in the shantytown.

He must reapply for a work permit each year at a cost of $600 and faces deportation if he loses his job. “The bossman is your security after God,” he says. “Haitian people are scared. There is no justice here.”

Stephen Harper Opens Door to Prison Privatization

By Alex Roslin
November 22, 2007
The Georgia Straight
[original article]

On April 27, 2006, the Ontario government announced the end of a bizarre venture. Canada's first large privately run prison, a 1,200-inmate maximum-security superjail in the cottage country north of Toronto, was a failure and would be taken over by the province.

The Penetanguishene-based Central North Correctional Centre was a striking attempt at getting in on the controversial private-prison craze that has swept the United States, where for-profit businesses now run approximately 150 prisons housing about 150,000 inmates. Ontario's five-year experiment with the concept, launched with much fanfare in 2001 by Robert Sampson–at the time the law-and-order Tory correctional services minister–ended amid revelations of flawed security, inadequate prisoner health care, and higher reoffending rates once the privately housed inmates were let back out into the world.

Today, Sampson has secured a gig with the Stephen Harper Conservatives leading a federal panel reviewing Canada's prison system. Its mandate includes finding "opportunities for savings including through physical plant realignment and infrastructure renewal".

Does the choice of Sampson mean the feds want to privatize Canadian prisons? Stockwell Day, the federal public safety minister, says no. "The question of privatization is not on the table," he told journalists after Sampson's appointment last April. But some critics aren't so sure. "We have to be very vigilant to see where this review is going and how broad it gets in terms of an agenda around privatization," NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) told a reporter.

Len Bush, national representative of 15,000 provincial prison guards in the National Union of Public and Government Employees, is also skeptical about Day's denial. "He's not actually come out and said, 'No, I won't privatize.' We would welcome him saying so. It looks to us that this is their direction, even though they're not in a situation where they feel they can say it publicly," he said on the phone from his Ottawa office.

Sampson submitted his report to the government on October 31, but it remains under wraps. In late October, though, news leaked from the Sampson panel suggesting that it was preparing to scrap statutory release, the virtually automatic discharge of prisoners under conditions similar to parole after they've served two-thirds of their sentences. Instead, "you'd have to show why you deserve to be released [at the two-thirds point]," a Canadian Press story quoted an unnamed source "familiar with the panel's report" as saying. "It'll put more people in [prison], so they're going to need more resources."

This has stoked the privatization fears: that the Harper government's law-and-order agenda could unleash a crisis of overcrowding in prisons, and guess what the magical solution will be? Private prisons. There is just one catch: crime experts say all this–dramatically increased prisoner numbers, possible privatization of prisons, and get-tough measures, including increased and mandatory sentences–will probably make Canadian communities less safe, not more.

At first glance, the plan may seem reasonable to some: make wrongdoers show they've changed. What could be wrong with that? It would force some to shape up, right? Wrong. Such a change would create instant havoc in already overcrowded provincial and federal prison systems by adding up to 30 or 40 percent more inmates virtually overnight, according to Neil Boyd, an SFU criminology professor who spoke to the Georgia Straight from his Bowen Island home.

The change in the statutory release rule could suddenly add another 2,200 prisoners to the federal corrections system, which currently houses 12,000 inmates–an increase of almost 20 percent, Anthony Doob, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, estimated on the phone from his office. "The math is pretty straightforward. You could create a crisis almost overnight by changing parole practices."

Combined with other tough crime measures being proposed by the Harper government, a sudden tsunami of inmates would also swamp provincial prison systems, since many of those affected are those with sentences under two years. In B.C., provincial jails are already overcrowded and boiling with violence since the province closed nine facilities in 2001, said Dean Purdy, chair of the corrections and sheriff's-services component of the B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union, representing 2,000 provincial corrections officers and sheriffs. At the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre, where Purdy works as a supervisor, there have been 39 assaults on guards since 2001, compared to five in the prior 15 years, he said. "I can't imagine what it will be like to run the jails with a higher count."

"It [the increase in inmates] will come as a rude surprise to the provinces," said Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, speaking on his cellphone from a conference in Toronto. "The feds will crack down on crime, but the provinces will be punished."

In October, Harper introduced his Tackling Violent Crime Act, Bill C-2, into the House of Commons, complete with a shopping list of ideas courtesy of the U.S. law-and-order lobby, including mandatory minimum sentences for certain offences and harsher penalties for gun crimes. Harper declared the bill a confidence motion and said he'd accept no amendments to it, meaning the government will fall should it be defeated by the opposition–unlikely, since the Liberals desperately want to avoid an election.

Criminologists and prison guards say the actual result of the Harper crime package will probably be not safer communities but, rather, private prisons in which the bottom line is king, not inmate rehabilitation.

With five to 10 years needed to build a new prison from conception to construction, coupled with Harper's ideological predisposition to outsourcing government programs, Jones said it's not a big leap to privatized prisons coming to Canada in a big way. "Our anxiety is they're going to grow the prison population so quickly, they will be left with few options."

Creating a crisis to push through a controversial change is straight out of the playbook of Mike Harris's Conservative government in Ontario when it privatized the Penetanguishene prison, NUPGE's Bush said. "The strategy of the Harris government was to create a crisis and bring privatization forward to deal with the crisis," he said. "You take an overcrowded situation, add more people, and you create a crisis. We were hoping the experience elsewhere would have taught them."

The U.S. experience with privatized prisons is full of cautionary tales. After federal and state authorities brought in tougher law-and-order crime laws (among them the infamous "three strikes" statutes)–like the mandatory minimum sentences now being proposed by Harper–in the 1980s and '90s, the American prison population quadrupled, from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million today. (Another 4.8 million Americans are out on parole or probation, meaning a total of one in 32 adult Americans is under the control of the justice system in one fashion or another.)

It's a myth, however, that the explosion in inmate numbers was about getting violent, hardened criminals off the street. Instead, the crackdown disproportionately targeted marginalized people and small-time drug offenders. In 2003, racial or ethnic minorities made up 68 percent of the U.S. prison population, according to U.S. Justice Department data.

So who were these new offenders driving the U.S. prison boom? Turns out a huge number of them were POWs–prisoners of the war on drugs. Between 1990 and 2000, the portion of inmates jailed for a drug offence shot up by 59 percent while those in for violent crimes actually fell from 17 to 10 percent, according to Justice Department numbers. By 2004, drug offenders made up 54 percent of sentenced federal prisoners, up from just 25 percent in 1980. Of all drug arrests, about two in five were related to marijuana. Moreover, nine in 10 marijuana busts involve possession only, not sale or manufacturing.

Early on, the big question became what to do with all these new guests of the correctional system. The crime crackdown led to a boom in the number of U.S. federal and state prisons, from 592 in 1974 to 1,023 in 2000. In one Texas county, 33 percent of the population is behind bars, according to a 2004 study by the Washington, D.C.–based Urban Institute.

Authorities turned to private companies to build and run many prisons. The largest operator by far is the Nashville, Tennessee–based Corrections Corp. of America, with 65 facilities under management, including 40 it owns outright, that house 72,000 inmates. Business at CCA is booming. Since 2000, its shares have shot up from $4 to almost $29.

But an independent study of CCA in 2003 found the company had failed to: provide adequate medical care to inmates, control violence in its facilities, and prevent a rash of escapes. Civil-rights violations have also been raised in hundreds of lawsuits against CCA by prisoners and their families, including several that revolved around inmate deaths. The study, cowritten by the U.K.–based Prison Privatisation Report International and the U.S. community group Good Jobs First, also said CCA tried to keep down costs by paying staff poorly, which resulted in high turnover and mistreatment of prisoners. Substandard conditions also had resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings, while several CCA guards had been convicted of drug trafficking inside the facilities.

A low point for the company came in the late 1990s, when it agreed to a payment of $2.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by prisoners at its Youngstown, Ohio, prison who said the facility was unsafe after a rash of stabbings. "It's been a nightmare," Youngstown's mayor, George McKelvey–who helped lure CCA to his city–said in an October 1998 Washington Post story. "[CCA's] credibility is zero."

CCA officials didn't return calls for this story.

The plague of scandals at CCA and other private prison operators prompted Business Week to publish a story in 2000 titled "Private Prisons Don't Work" that said "the industry's heyday may already be history."

"It's horror story after horror story in the U.S.," Lyle Stewart, spokesman for the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, representing 6,000 federal prison guards, said from his office in Montreal. "It's frigging terrible."

In recent years, many American states have retreated from the incarceration-oriented approach, largely because corrections now eat up seven percent of state budgets, on average. In 2000, California voters passed a resolution eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes and requiring treatment, not prison time, for nonviolent drug offenders. In November, even the hard-line Bush administration eased minimum sentencing guidelines for federal crack offences.

But while U.S. authorities step back from the ailing crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s, the John Howard Society's Jones sees the Harper government embracing the same troubled approach. "This government seems enthralled by the Bush administration," he said, noting that Harper's crime policies "seem to reflect a close study of the American model".

Jones said the Harper crime agenda is likely to fall heaviest on marginalized people, just as the measures did in the U.S. "Police go where the pickings are easiest. It will fall disproportionately on marginalized, mentally ill, and minority youth. You will not see more Conrad Blacks in jail," he said. "It's not about justice; it's about acting Old Testament."

From Bowen Island, SFU's Boyd agreed. "Why would we want to dramatically increase the number of people in jail for cannabis? That's what it [mandatory sentencing] did in the U.S. Why would we want to look at them [the U.S.] when looking at crime?" he asked, noting that the U.S. has 2.5 times more murders per capita than Canada.

"There's just no support for the idea that punishment will get the social safety we want. We should be looking at success stories," Boyd said, pointing to European countries that have promoted crime prevention and improved social housing over incarceration.

In fact, that's exactly the approach that was favoured by a crime prevention council within Canada's Public Safety Ministry when it reviewed corrections policy back in 1996. The council's study, which is posted on the ministry's Web site, doesn't mince words in its criticism of U.S. mandatory minimum sentencing as a failed model that did little to reduce crime rates while merely increasing the prison population.

"Not only is the cost of automatic incarceration brought about by this policy inordinately high, but it does little to stem the ongoing tide of new offenders," noted the study, titled Money Well Spent: Investing in Preventing Crime. "Minimum mandatory sentencing requirements rely upon the false assumption that people who are contemplating a criminal act–youths in particular–go through a rational process of planning their act and weighing the consequences of being apprehended."

As for Harper's plan to tighten parole eligibility, U of T's Doob said the notion goes against everything that's known about the importance of transitioning prisoners into society through supervised programs like parole and halfway houses. "Probably the worst thing you could do is hold a guy his whole sentence and then give him a bus ticket with no job, no program, and no controls."

Jones is also flabbergasted. "The evidence is clear that incarceration is the last resort. Most people do not benefit from it and a number of people get worse. Prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse."

Jones also is alarmed about privatized prisons making a return. "The staff [in private prisons] has less training. They employ harsher measures because they're cheaper; the conditions deteriorate. The inmates eventually get out, so it passes on the costs of dealing with them to future governments and generations. The issue is they're going to be worse when they get out."

Doob agreed, saying the evidence on privatized prisons is clear: "The data that exists in various countries suggests there are real problems in the ways that private companies run these things." Any money saved in direct operational costs is offset by the added expense of monitoring prison companies for contract compliance, a greater rate of prisoner escapes, and a higher recidivism rate. "It would be an ideological decision [to privatize prisons], not a financial one," he said.

The BCGEU's Purdy said provincial corrections officials weren't impressed when they travelled to Ontario to investigate the Penetanguishene experiment a few years ago. "They came back and told us they weren't interested in privatizing any jails in B.C.," he said.

Whatever Harper has in mind for the prison system, one thing is for sure: There's little chance he'll unveil any plans for privatizing prisons before the next federal election. Unless Harper wins a majority, it seems suicidal for him to take a chance on such a controversial idea. He'd have his hands full with furious federal prison guards who "would fight it to the death if there was any sense at all" of privatization plans, vowed Stewart.

Already, other elements of Harper's crime agenda seem destined for a collision course with the provinces, which are likely to flip out when they're hit with massive numbers of new prisoners.

Harper apparently isn't even finding many allies within the Correctional Service of Canada, even though it is likely to enjoy a massive budget increase to accommodate the new inmates. Jones said senior corrections officials see Harper's regressive policies as reversing years of hard-won policy gains in areas like parole and crime prevention.

"When the tide turns so dramatically, they [corrections officials] see their work as being undone," he said. "It turns back the clock on 40 years of progressive corrections policy."