Don’t be fooled by Senate’s GMO fake-labeling bill

Pro-GMO labeling supporters were planning on celebrating on July 1, the date when Vermont’s legislation became the first mandatory GMO labeling law of the land.

The state’s bold initiative protecting the consumer’s right to know compelled major food companies including General Mills, Campbell Soup, Kellogg and others to announce they would label for genetically modified organisms not just in Vermont, but throughout the United States, just as they have to do in 64 other countries.

Instead, just as we were beginning to see actual GMO disclosures in plain English on food packages across the country as a result of the Vermont law, a new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate on June 23 seeks to overturn Vermont’s law and ban states from ever passing GMO-labeling laws altogether.

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Unlike Vermont’s law that requires plain English on the ingredient panel, the Senate bill — the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard — introduced just one day before the Fourth of July holiday recess by ranking Senate Agriculture Committee members Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., calls for a watered-down national standard that would offer manufacturers the option of placing cryptic QR code symbols linking to websites or toll-free numbers on packages instead of plain English text to disclose if GMO ingredients are present.

Those using QR codes or “smartlabels” instead of English text would have to add a phrase such as “Scan here for more food information” but would not be required to use the term “GMO” or “Genetic Engineering” on the label — a key point to which GMO-labeling proponents strongly object.

In concession after concession to the biotech industry, the Senate bill also would tightly define genetic engineering so that all new untested biotechnology methods, such as CRISPR and gene editing, would be exempt from national disclosure standards. Foods refined to have the DNA removed would be exempt from any GMO labeling requirements, such as refined sugar from GMO sugar beets, corn syrup from GMO corn and oil from GMO canola. Milk or meat from animals fed GMO feed would be exempt from GMO labeling; similarly food sold in a restaurant “or similar food retail establishment” would not be required to label for GMOs.

While Vermont’s law calls for stiff noncompliance penalties of $1,000 per day per product, there is no such penalty under the Senate bill. USDA would have no authority to require recalls of products that don’t comply with the labeling requirements, and there would be no federal penalties for violations.

By pre-empting Vermont’s law immediately, along with calling for a two-year delay in any implementation of a national standard — combined with loopholes so big you could drive a truck through them — the Senate bill is the federal GMO labeling standard that isn’t.

In a concession to the organic industry, prompting a controversial endorsement of the Stabenow/Roberts bill from the Organic Trade Association, producers who have secured a Certified Organic designation from USDA would be allowed to display a “non-GMO” label on their products.

Three leading voices in the “healthy” food sector also urged support for the Senate’s bipartisan compromise on GMO labeling. During a panel at the 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival, Walter Robb, co-chief executive of Whole Foods Market, Jeff Dunn, president of Campbell Fresh, and Sam Kass, a former White House adviser who now works with food companies, all praised Roberts and Stabenow for coming to an agreement on a national solution.

Kass said he’d prefer on-pack labels, but argued that advocates got 75 percent of what they wanted and the deal should be supported.

But why? We had 100 percent of what we wanted with clear, mandatory, on-pack, English language labeling in the Vermont law — a straighforward law that already was compelling companies to label for GMOs across the nation. The Senate bill would kill that in favor of a loophole-ridden, voluntary-driven regulation that would favor corporations, not consumers.

Asking time-pressed moms — 93 percent of whom want GMO labeling, by the way — to photograph QR codes in stores that will take them to company websites to find out if a product they want to buy for their families contains GMOs isn’t going to work. Asking the big brands to pretty please fess up on GMOs isn’t going to work, either. It never has. Voluntary on-pack GMO labeling has been in place for decades. Same lipstick, sa6me pig.

Don’t be fooled by the Stabenow/Roberts compromise. Vermont is the labeling law we want, in plain English.

Steven Hoffman is managing director of Boulder-based Compass Natural.