With no debate and only a voice vote, the U.S. House of
Representatives Committee on Agriculture today (July 14, 2015) passed
out of committee
H.R. 1599,
a bill to preempt states’ rights to label GMOs. Within hours, it was
announced that the bill will go straight to the House floor, as early as
next week, with no vote in the Energy and Commerce Committee.
If we don’t stop it in the House next week, the fight to stop this
“Mother of All Monsanto Protection Acts” will take place next in the
U.S. Senate, by early fall. In his
opening statement
this morning, Committee Chairman Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas) (who
shortly after today’s vote said he will co-sponsor H.R. 1599) couldn’t
have sounded more like a Monsanto employee if he’d tried. Conaway nailed
the biotech industry’s favorite talking points and mistruths, beginning
with this one:
In testimony before this Committee,
multiple representatives of the food and agricultural sectors commented
on the cost burden that would be placed on our food system if we were to
allow the 50 States, more than 3000 counties and nearly 20,000 towns
and cities in the United States to establish their own laws regulating
interstate commerce.
Time and again, independent experts have stated that the cost of
labeling GMO foods and ingredients, to manufacturers, retailers and
consumers, would be negligible here in the U.S., just as it has been in
the more than 60 countries that already require labeling. GMO labels are
costless, as pointed out in this
Washington Post article. Companies regularly update their food packaging as they come up with new designs or marketing strategies.
And then there was the ultimate lie about GMOs, that they have been “proven safe:”
We all recognize that the overwhelming
consensus within the science community is that these biotech products
are safe. We likewise understand that each and every biotech product in
the marketplace today has been reviewed thorough a voluntary food
safety consultation process at the Food and Drug Administration.
Wrong. Ever since GMOs were introduced into the food system in the
1990s, without adequate, independent, pre-market safety testing, there
have been scientists and an increasing volume of of
research
indicating that these genetically engineered foods and the toxic
chemicals that accompany them are hazardous to human health and the
environment. The American Medical Association
believes GMO foods should be subjected to pre-market safety testing. And there is surely no
consensus,
as hundreds of scientists worldwide have confirmed, on the safety of
GMOs that have already been approved. That is a flat-out lie.
Conaway spoke instead about the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s
“voluntary food safety consultation process” as if that were a valid
means of proving safety.
Glaringly absent from Conaway’s statement was any mention of the
toxic chemicals used to grow GMO crops, and allowed to remain as residue
on GMO foods. Not one word was spoken about the World Health
Organization’s recent
determination that glyphosate, the chemical used on more than 80 percent of GMO crops, is a probably human carcinogen.
None of these statements, coming from a lawmaker with
ties
to Big Ag, were particularly surprising. But what should concern any
consumer ,voter, citizen or just plain common-sense thinking human
being, is that Conaway’s statement clearly focused on how to promote the
profits of corporations, rather than on how to protect people from
foods that have not been proven safe, and the arsenal of toxic chemicals
used to grow them. It was all about “marketing,” and how we need a
government program for food producers who want to voluntarily label
their products as GMO-free, or containing GMOs.
USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service
has long been in the business of assisting producers to develop programs
and tools to take advantage of market opportunities. The Biotechnology,
Horticulture and Research Subcommittee recently examined the programs
of the Agricultural Marketing Service. The Subcommittee concluded that
the agency has the resources and expertise to develop and administer a
robust marketing program for those wishing to notify consumers of the
presence or absence of genetically engineered ingredients in their food
products. What the agency doesn’t have is the law to make it work
uniformly across the country like we did 25 years ago when we passed the
Organic Foods Production Act.
Not one word on the devastation to the environment. Not on word on
how chemical-intensive, fossil-fuel-intensive industrial agriculture is
one of the largest
contributors,
if not the largest contributor, to global warming—and how if we don’t
fix this system, we can’t be serious about averting a climate disaster.
As Pope Francis
said recently, on the topic of genetic engineering and its use of toxic pesticides:
It creates a vicious circle in which
the intervention of the human being to solve a problem often worsens the
situation further. For example, many birds and insects die out as a
result of toxic pesticides created by technology, they are useful to
agriculture itself, and their disappearance will be compensated with
another technological intervention that probably will bring new harmful
effects… looking at the world we see that this level of human
intervention, often in the service of finance and consumerism, actually
causes the earth we live in to become less rich and beautiful, more and
more limited and gray, while at the same time the development of
technology and consumerism continues to advance without limits.
H.R. 1599 is an assault on consumer rights, an assault on democracy
and states’ rights. And if passed, it will only escalate the assault on
our health, and the health of Planet Earth.
Please help us continue to fight this disastrous and undemocratic piece of legislation.
