The very worthy proposal of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) that menus should state energy values is undermined by its failure to use proper measurement units.  UKMA has responded by advocating joules rather than so-called “calories” (whatever they may be).

Consultation closes today on the FSA’s proposal that restaurants (including fast food bars) should state the energy value of the food on their menus.  The purpose of this proposal would be to enable customers to relate their energy intake to their daily energy requirement – an important factor in leading a healthy lifestyle.  (In principle, if your energy intake exceeds your energy use you will gain weight – and vice versa.)

The catering industry has been wary of this proposal (not least because many fast food outlets rely on people eating unhealthily!) and the FSA’s proposal is for a voluntary rather than a statutory scheme.  It would be difficult if not impossible to enforce against the thousands of individual fish and chip shops and Chinese or Indian takeaways, so it is mainly targeted at the chains of fast food restaurants that populate every High Street, shopping mall, and motorway service station.

In its submission to the FSA, UKMA has not commented in detail on the (obviously laudable) principle of including energy values on menus, but has recommended that any scheme that is agreed with the industry should use proper measurement units that are compatible with those used in nutritional science.  In particular it has advocated the use of the joule (J) as the primary (or preferably the only) measurement unit rather than the obsolete and unsatisfactory “calorie” – or “kilocalorie” – or “Calorie”.

Unfortunately, the FSA consultation paper set a very poor example by equating the physical concept of “energy” with the misused word “calorie” – for example, writing “calorie intake” rather than “energy intake”.   This is in direct contradiction to the recommendation of the Royal Society – as long ago as 1972 – that “calories” should be discontinued – including in the media.

We give below an extract from UKMA’s submission (text in blue):

“The use of the kilojoule (kJ) vs. the use of the calorie (cal), Calorie (Cal), and kilocalorie (kcal)

We applaud the principle of giving consumers the ability to make purchasing decisions based on the energy content in food. However the consultation document’s proposed continued use of obsolete measurement units presents several issues:

The “calorie” is often confused with, or used in equivalence to, the “kilocalorie”.

A convention is sometimes applied which attempts to avoid the inevitable misunderstanding that this causes. This involves the use of a capital letter ‘C’ when “calories” are to read as “kilocalories”, such that:

1000 calories = 1 kilocalorie = 1 Calorie

Indeed, the consultation document itself is a good illustration of this issue as it uses the word “calorie” erroneously in several instances where the word “kilocalorie” or “Calorie” is intended. e.g. Annex H, 7.3 (text in green):

“Note: “kcal” is used in these statements but “calories” should be substituted if        “calories” are declared as the energy information at point of choice.”

The consultation document acknowledges that …

“36. To aid consumer understanding and contribute to consistency of labelling only one        form of expression (either kcal or calories) should be used in an outlet. “

However, this stipulation will not prevent inconsistency of labelling across different establishments.

In their 1972 report on nutritional sciences, the Royal Society identified the problem of the continued use of calories to describe energy content of food. Its conclusions remain valid nearly 40 years later (text in dark red):

“We are very much aware of the problems that arise because as a result of 30 years of education the public has an awareness of the term ‘calorie’. We cannot see any easy solution to the problem of substituting the concept that man has a requirement for the energy-yielding constituents derived from food, and this is measured in joules, …”

“We recommend that editors of journals should not allow the use of the word ‘calorie’ and list below some obvious alternatives :

calorie intake                                  energy intake

calorie requirement                         energy requirement …”

The Units Of Measurements Regulations, which implements Directive 80/181/EEC, requires that energy should be measured using the SI derived unit, the joule. The fact that the calorie is not an SI unit, and is not listed in the Directive, means that calories can only be authorised for use as supplementary indications, and should not appear more prominently than the primary measurement, in joules (J) or kilojoules (kJ).

Many packaged foods are already labelled in kilojoules (kJ).

Progressive countries such as Australia, have already adopted the kilojoule as the primary unit of energy to indicate energy content of food.

Conclusion

A single unit, the joule, used for all purposes regarding energy (not just food), will both benefit the consumer, and increase the general public’s understanding of the concept of energy in general.

It is for these reasons that we strongly recommend that the opportunity that this consultation presents should be taken to begin the phasing out of the obsolete unit “calorie” in favour of the “joule” (which incidentally is named after the British scientist, James Prescott Joule).

References:

REPORT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY’S BRITISH NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR NUTRITIONAL SCIENCES

METRIC UNITS, CONVERSION FACTORS AND NOMENCLATURE IN NUTRITIONAL AND FOOD SCIENCES

Report of the Subcommittee on Metrication of the British National Committee for Nutritional Science

Proc Nutr Soc. 1972 Sep;31(2):239-47.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=980848&jid=PNS&volumeId=31&issueId=02&aid=655296 “

[UKMA submission ends]

Further comment

Some have argued that the general public is familiar with “calories”, and to replace them with joules would be confusing and would reduce the effectiveness of the proposal to include energy values on menus.  This is to patronise the general public and underestimate their intelligence.  It is not difficult, for example,  to remember that the average daily energy requirement of an adult male is approximately 10 megajoules (10 MJ) and hence to relate that to a meal of, say, 4 MJ, or a bottle of wine at 2 MJ.  Moreover, to continue the dumbing down of energy information by using non-scientific units helps to maintain the gulf between the educated scientific community and people who have to rely on the popular media for their information.

The question of how best to measure energy (and also power) is a theme to which we shall return in a forthcoming article.

Technical footnote:

What the above Royal Society quotation does not explain is the reason why the joule is a better unit than the “calorie” (in all its variations).  This is because, whereas the value of the “calorie” is determined experimentally (by heating water), the joule is defined in terms of other SI units.  Thus, since energy = force x distance, a joule is a newton times a metre, or in other words the quantity of energy needed to accelerate a mass of one kilogram at a rate of one metre per second squared over a distance of one metre.  Similarly, a joule can be directly related to the watt (1 W = 1 J/s).  By contrast  the “calorie” is simply an unrelated anomaly that – unfortunately – has gained some currency in the popular media and some parts of the weight-watching industry.  It should be phased out as soon as possible, and the FSA should be helping in this – rather than prolonging its life.

The Transport Department’s refusal to comply with Government policy on metrication is the biggest remaining obstacle to completing the metric changeover.  But how can the DfT defend this example of non-joined-up government?

Although the Department for Transport (DfT) has recently proposed the replacement of imperial-only height and width restriction signs (roundels and warning triangles) with dual metric/imperial signs within 4 years, it has furiously denied that this proposal is part of a comprehensive plan for converting the UK’s road signs. A DfT spokesperson is quoted as saying that the proposal was “absolutely not the thin end of the wedge” and that there were no plans at all to use kilometres, rather than miles, on distance signs, adding: “This is a specific solution to a specific problem” (i.e. a disproportionate number of damaging bridge strikes by foreign lorries).

In its refusal to accept the inevitability of metric road signs the DfT is increasingly at odds with other Government Departments – and indeed with stated Government policy on metrication.  Consider the following quotations:

(a)  “As you will be aware, all Governments since 1965 have adopted the policy that the United Kingdom should – in stages – switch from imperial to metric units of measurement for an ever-increasing range of uses.”

(b)  “The Government’s longstanding policy in relation to units of measurement is to move to full metrication in time but at a pace that recognizes that a significant proportion of consumers are still more comfortable with using imperial units.”

Quotation (a) is from a letter dated 15 September 2004 from former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to UKMA’s patron, the former Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, Lord Howe.  Quotation (b) is from a letter dated 7 December 2008 from the Minister for Science, Lord Drayson, to the Chairman of the UK Metric Association.

Even more recently (25 February 2010),  the junior Minister of Health, Baroness Thornton, said in the House of Lords that she “absolutely agreed” that it is time to clear up the “very British mess”.  All these statements make it clear that full metrication is the ultimate goal, and none of them adds  “Oh, by the way, we didn’t mean to include road signs”.

Indeed the Transport Department itself appeared for many years to accept that metric conversion was inevitable – while endeavouring to postpone the date for as long as possible. For example in July 2002, in answer to a Parliamentary Question asking what plans there were “to replace miles with kilometres on traffic signs used to indicate speed limits and distances”, the then Transport Minister, David Jamieson, responded:

“Although many drivers are familiar with metric units, it would not be appropriate to fix a date for converting speed limit and distance signs while there is still likely to be a significant proportion of drivers for whom the change could be potentially confusing.” (Hansard, 11 July 2002, Col. 1116w).

The clear inference to be drawn from this somewhat ambivalent reply is that, when there is no longer a “significant” proportion of such confused drivers, then it would be appropriate to fix a date for conversion.

Since then, the DfT has hardened its stance against conversion.  As it is now likely that the majority of UK drivers were born after 1964 (and would therefore have received their secondary education in metric units), the argument about “confused “ drivers has lost most of whatever validity it had. So the DfT have come up with a new argument: cost. They claimed that the cost of converting half a million signs, estimated at £680 - 760 million (ca. £1400/sign) would be disproportionate to the benefits for transport and is not a priority for scarce resources.

UKMA believes that the costs have been grossly exaggerated – possibly deliberately. It is palpably absurd to claim that the average cost of amending or replacing road signs is £1400 per sign. UKMA’s “most probable” estimate was £160 per sign, and this is supported by independent data. [See this link for details]. The DfT is guilty of “shroud waving” in order to protect its budget.

Even if the DfT cost estimate were credible, it is still only a tiny proportion of total transport expenditure (£21.5 billions in 2007/08), and is capable of being spread over several years and partially absorbed within existing budgets.

All other sectors of the economy have already absorbed the costs of change within their own budgets. Manufacturing industries have retooled their factories, retailers have invested in new scales and retrained their staff, schools have redesigned syllabuses and purchased new textbooks – yet the DfT has continually sought to postpone the inevitable – thereby actually increasing the eventual cost (as any additional new imperial signs will have to be amended or replaced). An example of this DfT waste is the decision to launch a programme of reduced speed limits in residential areas while still denoting those speed limits in miles rather than kilometres per hour. Thus, in 2007/08, as a Freedom of Information request has revealed,  the city of Portsmouth installed 3128 “20 mph” signs (on new posts) at a cost of £313 000 (average cost £100), much of which will have to be duplicated when they are eventually changed to “30 km/h”.

Indeed the DfT appears to believe that it can stand aside indefinitely from Government policy on measurement units and that road signs will always be a “stand alone” system, separate from the rest of society.  In doing so, the DfT is the last major obstacle to the achievement of a single, rational system of weights and measures in the UK.

As long as road signage and speed limits remain imperial, it will be difficult for many people to shed the habit of thinking of distances in terms of miles, yards, feet and inches or of speeds in terms of miles per hour.  This lack of facility to think in terms of metres, kilometres and kilometres per hour then spills over to other walks of life.  Weather forecasters feel obliged to translate windspeeds from metres per second or kilometres per hour to the more familiar miles per hour.  Journalists, fearing that their readers will not understand metres, feel bound to translate foreign news stories from metres to feet (or yards).  DIY shops and garden centres feel bound to give product descriptions and instructions in feet and inches.  Publishers of road maps and atlases fail to take full advantage of the kilometre-based National Grid for identifying locations.

As long as this imperial anomaly persists, many people will have difficulty in making the change in other fields and in “thinking metric”.  It is therefore essential to the achievement of the metric changeover in other fields (such as news reporting, weather forecasting, advertising, product description and maps and atlases) that road signage is brought into line.  It is untenable that it can continue to be a “stand alone” system.

In the national interest, the DfT should fall in line with Government policy.

One further Government pronouncement is worth quoting. This is from the 1972 White Paper (paragraph 107):

“The present system for showing speed limits and other road signs is unlikely to be changed for a long time to come.”

The author of that statement was right: 38 years later they haven’t been changed. One wonders how much longer they think they need.

In response to UKMA’s patron, Lord Howe, the junior Health Minister, Baroness Thornton said she “absolutely agreed” that it is “time for all of us, in all parties,…. to work together to clear up this long-standing and very British mess.”  She added “This is a matter that will solve itself over time but it is our job in government to move as fast as we can towards people recognising and feeling comfortable using metric calculations.”

The full text of the exchange is printed in Hansard and can be read here.  A video clip may also be viewed at this link.

The background to this exchange was covered in our recent article “NHS risking patients’ lives with imperial scales”, which gives links to the relevant documents.  Briefly, an official report found that, despite previous warnings, 30% of NHS hospitals were still using scales that are switchable between metric and imperial, and 10% were actually being used in imperial mode.  This risks wrong doses of drugs (which are calculated in metric) being administered to vulnerable patients – with possibly disastrous consequences.

The Minister’s statement is welcome as a public confirmation that it really IS Government policy “to move toward full metrication in time” (quoted from a letter from the Science Minister, Lord Drayson).  However, I do have reservations about her comment that “this is a matter that will solve itself in time”.  By this of course she was presumably echoing the widespread assumption that, since children are educated in metric units, as older people die out, metric units will gradually become the default for the general population, and imperial units will fall out of use.  If only this were true …

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise. The alternative view is that, after ca 35 years of metric education in schools, acceptance and use of metric units varies with occupation, educational standard and social class – and also with the mistaken  perception that metric units are “foreign”.  On this view, we have reached a stable but highly unsatisfactory situation of “two systems” with no prospect of resolution – without specific Government action.

The other reservation that one must have about the Minister’s statement – however welcome it may be – is that although she speaks for the Department of Health, the policy is not carried through to other aspects of Government – notably Transport.  We shall return to this point in a forthcoming article.

Going back to the exchange in the House of Lords, it is good that the Health Department is now committed to issuing an “alert” reminding all NHS hospitals of the importance of metric-only scales.  This will reduce the risk of a catastrophic accident resulting from confusion over measurement units.  So let us congratulate Baroness Thornton and hope that, with her support, stones, pounds and ounces can finally be eradicated from the NHS.

What units do you choose when you are writing travel books and other popular non-fiction for English speakers, wherever they might be found? (Article written by a reader of Bill Bryson’s books)

For those who have not come across his books, a few words about Bill Bryson may be helpful. Mr Bryson was born in the USA in 1951, and lived both in England and the USA before settling in England in 2003. He worked as a journalist until 1987, and then became a freelance writer.

For his travel books, Mr Bryson uses the units of measurement he finds in common use in the country he is describing. Easy for him, and it should seem logical to the reader. What a shame that the BBC does not adopt this policy for its news reports from around the world.

But when Mr Bryson embarked on ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything‘, or, as John Waller of the Guardian called it, ‘a rough guide to science’, his decision on units was not so simple.

Should he:

• Use metric, and put off many US readers?
• Use US customary units (USC), antagonise many readers outside the US, reduce the credibility of the science, and defeat one of the purposes of the book?
• Use a mixture of units, and risk antagonising everyone?
• Abandon the project?

Fortunately for his readers, he persevered, trying to use USC for ‘conversational’ English and metric for the science. Thus, the Introduction of the book uses USC entirely; Chapter 1, about the universe, is 5:1 in favour of USC; Chapter 2, about the solar system, is 3:1 in favour of metric; and so on.

In my view, as a UK reader, this is not entirely successful, but I have some sympathy for Mr Bryson who had to reach a decision on which system to use each time he needed a measurement unit. There must have been many occasions when he was writing the book that he wished the English-speaking world used a single system of measurement.

What would you have done in his shoes?

In 2004, the book won the Aventis prize for general science, and in 2005 the EU Descartes prize for science communication.

Finally, here is a quote from the popular video “Globalisation and the Information Age” by Karl Fisch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q ) for would-be Brysons to consider:

“China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world.”

One of our readers in the US, Ezra Steinberg, provides this comment on the situation in Myanmar.

“There was a lively discussion on the USMA mailing list about Burma and whether they have finally converted to metric. One writer who publishes a column in the UK (Peter Hitchens blog, Mail on line, 11 February 2010. Ed) stated flatly that they have converted based on what he observed from his last recent visit. He also excoriated those who suggest that the UK should abandon Imperial weights and measures in favor of metric, which presumably makes his assertion about Burma all the more credible.

So, to get more information, I just bought and downloaded the Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar (Burma) or at least the chapter on practical matters. (It cost me less than two bucks for just the one chapter and my curiosity got the better of me). Here is what they say about weights and measures:

1 Burmese viss or 100 ticals = 3.5 lbs; 1 gaig = 36 in; petrol is sold by the gallon [sic]; distances are in miles, not kilometres.

Since I believe the books are published in the UK, they must be referring to an Imperial and not a U.S. gallon.

I noted in one of their (free) excerpts from another part of the book that they referred to the length of a particular railway journey in kilometres, which I presume was done for the benefit of their (UK) readers.

In the chapter I downloaded they also refer to customs regulations as follows (in part):

Visitors are permitted to bring in the following items duty free:
400 cigarettes, 100 cigars, 250 g of tobacco, 2 L of liquor and 0.5 L of perfume.

While these values may be conversions to metric for the UK reader, I suspect that the rational amounts listed indicate that these are the values announced and enforced by the customs authorities, which I presume means the officers look at the metric values listed on the labels of the goods brought into the country and ignore any Imperial or USC indications. But of course I cannot know this for sure just from this excerpt.

I also learned from this chapter that Myanmar has one of the highest rates of death by snakebite in the world. Be careful!

They also say that the local Myanmar Standard Time (MST) is 6.5 hours ahead of GMT/UTC (1 hour ahead of India and half an hour behind Thailand). And they say that twenty-four hour time is often used for train times.

I won’t reproduce what they say about toilets. Suffice it to say it’s not up to North American or Western European standards.

Most Myanmar Buddhists use an eight-day week in which Thursday to Tuesday conform to the Western calendar but Wednesday is divided into two 12-hour days (Wow! Ezra).

All Myanmar traffic goes on the right-hand side of the road. This wasn’t always so. In an effort to distance itself form the British colonial period, the military government instigated an overnight switch form the left to the right in 1970. By far, most cars either date from before 1970 or are low-cost Japanese models, so steering wheels are perilously found on the right-hand side — this becomes particularly dicey when a driver blindly zooms to the left to pass a car!

There was no mention of whether Fahrenheit or Celsius is used … or something else altogether!

Oh, and last but not least, the Burmese word for “help” is “keh-bah!” (They also list many other useful phrases in translation, including “I’m lost’, “I’ve been robbed”, and “Go away!”)”

MetricViews is curious to know if any of our readers have first-hand experience of metrication progress in Myanmar, or Liberia for that matter. We suspect that both countries, like the UK and the US, have made progress along the continuum from customary to metric measures; the crucial question is “How far?”

Although it is widely assumed that the next Parliament (to be elected no later than June 2010) will contain more Conservative and fewer Labour MP’s, is it possible that they may be more sympathetic to completing the metric changeover?  (Article based on a draft by Martin V.)

On Saturday 23rd January 2010, the Times ran an article on the ‘Oxford Mafia’ that was running Britain.  They listed 18 prominent politicians who were active in Oxford University political associations between 1984 and 1990.  They included eleven Conservative Party supporters, six Labour Party supporters and one Liberal Democrat. The names included David Cameron and Ed Balls who both studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) between 1985 and 1988.

Given their ages, it is likely that they were at junior school between 1974 and 1983.  During that time imperial units were all but banned from the classroom.  They would never have learned how to manipulate pounds, shillings and pence nor would they have learned how to manipulate yards, feet and inches, or stones, pounds and ounces.  It would have been too much to expect the school syllabus to include square yards, acres and square miles. The only exposure that they would have had to non-metric units would have been the manipulation of days, hours, minutes and seconds and conversions between Fahrenheit and Celsius – the latter because the value of “c” in the equation y=mx+c is non-zero.

There are likely to be many new faces in Parliament in a few months time. I wonder how many of the new MPs will be able to calculate the average weight of a number of people using stones and pounds, or the average height of a group of people using feet and inches.  This is a skill that they should have picked up in the final years of junior school or the early years of secondary school.  And will they be honest enough to admit that they were not taught this skill and that the only way compensate for this problem is to complete the conversion to the metric system.

Scientists often complain that they are much misunderstood and they worry that they are failing to get their message across to the general public.  At the same time, most scientists refuse to get involved in the campaign to persuade the Government and the general public to complete the metric changeover.  Could there be a connection?

When challenged on their reluctance to get involved in the metrication debate, scientists, engineers and industrialists often reply:  “It’s not our problem. We already operate entirely in metric.  Obviously, it would be better if everybody used the same units, but we can cope with the muddle in the wider society. It is for the politicians to sort it out.”

Meanwhile, successive Ministers have indicated that they have no plans for further metrication.  They claim that stakeholders (industry, professional bodies, consumer groups) have not raised the subject, and therefore the Government will not tackle the problem.  Indeed, they fail to defend the progress already made and try to mollify opponents by blaming the EU or over-zealous trading standards officers, even suggesting that the law should not be enforced (see Times report).

One can perhaps understand the nervousness of politicians about confronting the populist tabloids on an issue that is so woefully misunderstood and misrepresented, but we should be able to expect more of scientists, engineers and industrialists, who would have much to gain from an educated and informed public comfortable with using the same units as scientists.

So what are the problems for science and industry?

It is half a century since C.P Snow drew attention to the intellectual gulf between science and the humanities. The “two cultures” still exist but they have been reinforced by a further gulf between people who speak metric, both at work and in the normal course of their lives (often people with a higher level of education, or those with some scientific or technical background), and people who prefer not to speak metric (often persons with little contact with the world of industry, technology or science).

As the Science Council recently observed1­ (see this press release), scientists need to explain themselves better to society, especially to young people.  This is because science is much misunderstood and misrepresented in the media, resulting in much public distrust.  Symptoms of this are the growth of non-scientific (or anti-scientific) medicine such as homeopathy or acupuncture, the drop in take-up of the MMR vaccine, with harmful consequences such as the preventable deaths of unvaccinated children, the campaign against genetically modified crops and in favour of “organic” farming, the growth of “creationism” as a serious alternative to Darwinism in science lessons in schools.

So what has this got to do with metrication – or, rather, with completing metrication?

It is suggested that one of the causes of this gulf of incomprehension and distrust is that scientists (and most industries) speak metric, whereas many non-scientists, even if they are partly conversant with metric units, generally default to “traditional” imperial units.  The media try (often incompetently) to translate scientific reports into imperial units and dumb them down for public consumption.  Thus, heights are measured in “double decker buses” and areas in “football pitches” or “the size of Wales”.  Similarly, industries that are entirely metric for their internal operations (e.g. private housebuilding) convert to imperial in the show house; and NHS hospitals, having carefully weighed a new-born baby in kilograms, translate into lbs and oz for the benefit of the grandmother or the media.

The fact that scientists speak in a language (metric) that is perceived as alien and “unnatural” is an additional, unnecessary barrier that makes communication with non-scientists even more difficult than it would otherwise be.  The challenge is to make metric the “natural” language of everybody.

There is also a more serious point to the intrusion of imperial measures into the NHS.  As the recent reports from LACORS2 showed, 30% of NHS hospitals still use switchable metric/imperial scales (and some even use them in the imperial mode), with the potential for disastrous errors in calculating doses, especially for young infants.

Unfortunately, the answer does not lie in education (as the Government originally hoped).  Indeed education is part of the problem.  Although maths and science have used metric units in the classroom since at least 1974, this has not been carried through to other parts of the curriculum, and there is much anecdotal evidence that teachers default to imperial in other lessons or on the football field.  Thus children learn that metric is for science and maths, but that otherwise imperial is normal. The “two systems” are entrenched.

It may even be worse than this.  The current curriculum requires the teaching of rough conversions between metric and imperial – although without formal instruction in the relationship between units (i.e. 16 oz in 1 lb, 1760 yds in a mile, etc).  The result is that many children leave school without a secure grasp of either metric or imperial but have to cope with a society that mixes both systems.  There is evidence3 from both sides of the Atlantic that attempting to teach children two incompatible systems adds one academic year to maths teaching.  Science relies heavily on a good grounding in maths, and anything that retards progress in maths must have an adverse effect on science education.

So what should be done about it – and how can scientists help?

The overriding objective should be that everybody should understand and use the same units for all purposes – including shopping, cooking, driving, in the hospital, in school, in the science lab and in the pub.  The current “two systems” approach must be brought to an end and the redundant system phased out. There clearly is no question that we could revert to the 1950s and standardise on imperial.  This would be a disaster for our international trade and for science, technology and industry in the UK.  The only practical way of standardising on a single system is to complete the metric changeover.

To quote the CBI4 as long ago as 1970: “It never made much sense to talk of industry going metric in isolation. All parts of the economy are interdependent, and whilst timing and method must be left to individual decision it is likely to be in the interests of all that the economy should move forward roughly in step together.”

Scientists can both help their own cause and do society a good turn by overcoming their reluctance to get involved in the political debate.  To their credit, the Institute of Physics supported UKMA’s publication, “A very British mess”, in 2004, but there has been very little comment from the scientific community since then.  It is time for scientists, individually and collectively, to SPEAK OUT!

References

1 Science Council press release (7 November 2008).  Available at http://www.sciencecouncil.org/documents/FutureMorphLaunch.pdf (viewed on 11 January 2010)

2 Local Authority Co-ordinators of Regulatory Services (LACORS) The weight of the matter (August 2008 and June 2009) Available at http://ukma.org.uk/files/docs/19736.pdf and http://ukma.org.uk/files/docs/21749.pdf (both viewed on 11 January 2010)

3 Phelps, R.P. Education System Benefits of U.S. Metric Conversion published in Evaluation Review, February 1996.

4 Quoted in the 1972 White Paper on Metrication (paragraph 57).  Available at http://www.metric.org.uk/Docs/DTI/met1972.pdf (viewed on 11 January 2010)

A recent posting by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) has prompted this question: Are American labelling requirements now illegal under WTO rules?

NIST, which is part of the US Department of Commerce, recently issued the following statement on its website:

“The EU Metric Directive [sic] (80/181/EEC), scheduled to go into effect January 1, 2010, has been modified to allow the continuation of both supplemental (U.S. customary, inch-pound) and metric units for consumer goods sold in the EU. The rule was published on May 7, 2009 in the Official Journal of the European Union.

The Directive instructs the European Commission to produce a report to the Parliament and Council regarding the smooth functioning of the internal market and international acceptance of SI units by December 31, 2019, including proposals where appropriate.

Demonstrated progress will be important for U.S. stakeholders to achieve long-term acceptance of supplemental units [sic] in the EU. Modifying the U.S. Fair Package and Labeling Act (FPLA), which currently requires dual labeling, to permit optional metric labeling is an example where greater international marketplace acceptance of SI units can be achieved.”

[This report is slightly inaccurate in that the Directive has been in force since 1980, and in any case its proper informal title is the “Units of Measurement Directive”]

The statement is so badly written that it is difficult to work out what it means.  In particular, the final paragraph , in so far as the words mean anything, appears to be gobbledegook.  There is no question that supplementary “units” should “achieve long term acceptance” in the EU.  The recent amendment to the Directive was simply a concession to exporters to remove a potential (alleged) business cost and/or barrier to trade – that is, the requirement for separate labelling for the EU and US markets. The only units legal for trade in the EU will continue to be metric (with the minor exception of the pint (imperial – not US) in limited circumstances in the UK and Ireland), but supplementary “indications” (not units) will be permitted on labels. The inability of NIST to get its head round this simple concept is depressing.

Perhaps I read too much into it, but why did the statement include reference to the review in 2019?  Surely, NIST is not planning to lobby the EU to allow American units as primary units with no metric equivalent stated?  In fact the obvious interpretation is that Directive’s intention is that the Commission should report on whether it will still be necessary to permit supplementary indications.

The statement’s final sentence is also nonsense.  Amending the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) will not achieve “greater international marketplace acceptance of SI units”.  They already are accepted internationally – except in the USA!

If NIST feel that their statement has been misinterpreted, then perhaps they can explain what they really did mean.

However, NIST is right to focus on the issue of whether the FPLA should be amended to permit metric-only labelling on goods that are regulated at the federal level. Current federal law requires both metric and US customary units on regulated goods, and so far all attempts to introduce into Congress an amendment to permit metric-only labels have been blocked as a result of lobbying by powerful US business interests such as the Food Marketing Institute (FMI). (Illogically, they seem to believe that allowing voluntary metric-only labelling would compel them to change the sizes of their packages).  Further details can be read on the USMA website at http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/fpla-update.html

(It should also be explained that some goods that are not regulated at the federal level may be regulated at the level of the State, and most States do in fact permit metric-only labels on these goods).

The question now arises whether the FPLA is a non-tariff barrier to trade.  Such barriers, unless they can be justified on legitimate grounds (e.g. health and safety), are illegal under the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and this was one of the reasons why the European Commission agreed to support the continuation of supplementary indications on packages within the EU.  Otherwise the USA might have filed a complaint against the EU. However, arguably, the boot now appears to be on the other foot.

European (and other non-US) manufacturers would naturally expect to label their goods in metric units only.  However, if they want to export those goods to the USA, they will need to incur an increased business cost by adding an additional label or alternatively creating completely different packaging for the US market. Of course, they could simply standardise on a uniform dual-unit label and use this in all markets worldwide – but why should they?  Since the EU’s concession to the USA was not reciprocated, its effect is that EU manufacturers who currently export or might in the future export to the USA have effectively lost the option to label their goods in metric units only. The USA has effectively imposed dual-unit labelling world-wide – a form of American imperialism.

Can anything be done to retrieve the situation?  Whether a complaint to the WTO would be upheld probably depends on what view its Appellate Body would take of the argument that EU (and other) manufacturers should be free to label in metric-only and should not be compelled to dual-label simply because a single state (however powerful) refuses to use the same measurement system as the rest of the world.   Arguably, if the USA wishes to engage in international trade, it should be expected to accept the international system of measurement and not impose unnecessary burdens on foreign manufacturers.

In my view the European Commission should be seriously considering such a complaint – or at least it should let it be known (diplomatically of course) that unless there is progress on amending the FPLA, a complaint might be filed.  Without such an implied sanction, it is difficult to see how the US Congress might be persuaded to drop its opposition.