By Julie Kelly
Friday, March 11, 2016
The U.S. Senate is on the verge of settling the nation’s
fiercest food fight: GMO labeling. And if you need an example of lawmakers,
lobbyists, special interest groups, and corporations wasting time and money on
a manufactured problem that is completely inconsequential to the health and
welfare of the American people, look no further than this.
The fight is about whether food companies should disclose
the presence of GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, in their products.
This applies to hundreds of ingredients, from soybean oil to vitamins to
cheese. In the U.S., almost all corn, soy, and cotton crops are genetically
engineered to tolerate herbicides or resist pests, so any by-product of those
crops would require a label. Same with
canola. Sugar from sugarbeets, which produce more than half the sugar supply
here and are also grown via genetically engineered seeds, would need a label.
The list goes on.
No good justification for a label exists: Ingredients
derived from these crops pose no health or safety concern and do not compromise
the nutritional value of food. That, however, has not impressed our esteemed
United States Senate, which will take a break from terrorism and trade pacts to
deliberate a new label on a can of soup.
On one side of the debate are organic-food companies and
environmental groups that want the labels as part of their ongoing crusade to
malign the technology and boost profits. On the other side are food,
agriculture, and biotech interests that don’t want labels but have done a lousy
job defending themselves. Both sides have spent tens of millions of dollars in
the past few years, leaving confused consumers in the middle.
The biggest dispute is over whether a label should be
mandatory. On March 1, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed a bill,
sponsored by Chairman Pat Roberts (R., Kans.), that would prevent states from
instituting their own labeling laws. It would also direct the Department of
Agriculture to draft voluntary guidelines that food companies can consult
should they choose to use the meaningless label. Although the bill was voted
out of committee with bipartisan support, it faces an uphill battle in the full
Senate, since many Democrats want the label to be mandatory.
A competing bill introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley (D.,
Ore.) would require a label on gazillions of food products sold in the U.S.
(even though voters in his state rejected a GMO-labeling referendum in 2014).
California senator Dianne Feinstein is a co-sponsor; her state, too, voted down
a GMO-labeling law, in 2012.
Merkley took to the Senate floor on March 9 to defend his
bill:
Why have big government say, “We
don’t trust you with the information”? And “we’re not going to allow you to
know what’s in your food.” No, that should be in some dictatorship, not here in
the United States of America. Big Ag says, “We don’t believe in this whole ‘we
the people’ model of a republic.”
(This from a guy with a 0 percent ranking from Citizens
Against Government Waste.)
The issue has even spilled over into the presidential
race. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long sought GMO
labels as a way to punish one of his favorite whipping boys, seed company
Monsanto. He’s tweeted several times recently in favor of the labeling bill:
“Vermont and other states must be allowed to label GMOs. Parents have a right
to know what they’re feeding their kids.” A few years ago, Sanders proposed a
mandatory GMO-labeling bill. It failed. His socialist, anti-corporate views
represent the ideological backbone of the anti-GMO movement.
Sanders’s home state of Vermont is the only one with a
GMO-labeling law on the books, set to take effect July 1, which is why the
Senate is scrambling to pass the Roberts bill. Food companies, instead of
pulling unlabeled products from the shelves of Vermont grocery stores and
forcing Vermonters to live with the consequences of a pointless, punitive law,
have lobbied Congress to stop the law from going into effect. (The House of
Representatives passed a similar bill last July.)
Unfortunately, lawmakers have little choice. The
organic-food industry, along with its ideological soulmates in the
environmental movement, has mounted a misleading fear campaign directed at
consumers, hoping to scare them away from foods with GMOs. (Organic products
cannot contain genetically modified ingredients.) Label pushers have poured
millions into state referenda, all of which have failed, and lobbied for state
laws across the country. One group — Just Label It, funded by Gary Hirshberg,
chairman of Stonyfield Organic — even paraded Gwyneth Paltrow around Capitol
Hill last summer to admonish moms and lawmakers about the dangers of GMOs.
They have no intention of backing down. A mandatory label
would be a huge victory for the organic industry. It would also put them one
step closer to their ultimate goal of eliminating genetically engineered food
from our food supply. That move is potentially costly, given that new
technologies that depend on genetic modification of crops and are in the
pipeline could address a number of issues, from animal health to food waste to
crop disease.
This is a phony issue unworthy of the Senate’s time.
Instead of talking about ISIS or the economy, senators are talking about cereal
boxes and saving butterflies. In this campaign environment, no issue seems too
trivial to capture the attention of our political leaders.
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