> "The flooding of U.S. rice into Haiti is not only economically violent for Haitian peyizan who struggle to sell their local product, but also violent toward t

> "The flooding of U.S. rice into Haiti is not only economically violent for Haitian peyizan who struggle to sell their local product, but also violent toward the long-term health of Haitian consumers," the report said. This seems like a very strange way for a research paper to talk about chemical analyses. The Reuters article doesn’t cite the paper directly, but it’s here [0]. I note from their paper that rice from all non-Haitian origins, not just the US, contained what they describe as worrying levels of arsenic. I’m also confused by their (mislabeled) graphs attempting to suggest that the levels are routinely harmful. Those graphs all seem to reflect people whose bodies weigh between 8 and 20kg each eating 1.5 cups dry = 300g dry = 1kg cooked rice daily. That seems like a lot of rice for a baby to eat, but I don’t know what’s normal. What’s more, their graphs seem like they’re saying both local and imported rice would largely fall below the “cancer risk” threshold they show on one set of graphs, and both largely exceed the “non-cancer health outcome” thresholds they’re interested in. To top it off, in their conclusion, they mention that they know they’ve been measuring the wrong thing all along: they’re measuring total arsenic levels, while the standards they use refer to concentrations of inorganic arsenic. The EPA says that organic arsenic is nontoxic and harmless. [2] > By measuring only total arsenic levels, our measurements do not exactly correspond to thresholds set by Codex and the U.S. FDA, which are based on inorganic arsenic concentrations. A quick look at other widely-cited experimental research suggests that around 40% of the total arsenic in US rice is the harmful, inorganic kind [3]. And the remainder of the total arsenic count is the nontoxic organic kind. Which suggests that if the researchers at hand had measured the thing that was actually harmful, instead of including harmless things with a similar name, they’d find that all the rice in question was below the worrisome thresholds, even for the small humans they’re worried about. I wonder if the same policy agenda informs the rest of the editorial decisions at the “Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.” A causal glance suggests an activist kind of flavor [1], but I don’t have much of a baseline on norms in the “food justice” discipline. [0] https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/view/1221/1186 https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/vie... [1] https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj [2] e.g. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/documents/arsenic_april_2021.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/documents/ar... [3] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es802612a https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es802612a