The United States Senate has a bill that would regulate labelling of
foods containing genetically-modified crops.
It
still faces a few hurdles before it becomes law, such as meshing it
with a different bill passed by the House of Representatives
.
Nor
will it undo the Vermont legislation, the first in the nation to make
GMO labelling compulsory.
But
no other states will be allowed to pass GMO labelling legislation and
regulations, meaning food-processing companies will have one set of
standards to follow for distribution and sales.
“Unless
we act now, Vermont law denigrating biotechnology and causing
confusion in the marketplace is the law of the land,” Republican
Senator
Pat Roberts from
Kansas who
chairs
the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in a prepared
statement.
“Our
marketplace--both consumers and producers--needs a national
biotechnology standard to avoid chaos in interstate commerce,”
Roberts
said.
The
Vermont law takes effect July 1, which has been a looming deadline
for months for food manufacturers and lawmakers.
As
many consumer groups advocated, the proposed
Senate bill would
require food manufacturers to say if a food contains genetically
modified ingredients. However, consumers who are concerned about GMOs
may have to do some extra sleuthing when they read a product’s
label, which can disclose the GM foods through text, a symbol,
website link or QR code.
There
are a few exceptions to the labeling proposal. Foods that consist
primarily of beef, poultry, pork or eggs would not be required to
have a GM label, even if they ate GM corn or soybeans. “The
legislation prohibits the Secretary of Agriculture from considering
any food product derived from an animal to be bioengineered solely
because the animal may have eaten bioengineered feed,” the Senate
statement noted.
The
bill also does not apply to foods created with emerging
gene editing technologies such
as
CRISPR,
but
rather focuses on foods that have been developed through conventional
recombinant DNA techniques.
