President Obama is ready to sign the GMOs-in-food disclosure bill that is speeding through Congress and would punctuate more than two decades of controversy over agricultural biotechnology. The House was expected to give final congressional approval to the bill today, sending it to the White House one week after Senate passage.
The bill overrides state GMO food-label laws and allows foodmakers to use digital code, a symbol or wording on the package to inform consumers of genetically engineered ingredients. Once enacted, it would immediately pre-empt Vermont’s first-in-the-nation labeling law while USDA would have two years to design a mandatory nationwide disclosure system. Court challenges are likely.
“We look forward to tracking its progress in the House and anticipate the President would sign it in its current form,” said White House spokeswoman Katie Hill. “While there is broad consensus that foods from genetically engineered crops are safe, we appreciate the bipartisan effort to address consumers’ interest in knowing more about their food, including whether it includes ingredients from genetically engineered crops.”
GMO labeling blossomed unexpectedly into a partisan Senate issue earlier this year, creating a three-month impasse on the issue. Opposition withered when Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts and the senior Democrat on the committee, Debbie Stabenow, coupled state pre-emption with mandatory disclosure. Senators passed the bill on a bipartisan 63-30 rollcall on July 7.
State pre-emption was the top priority of farm groups and foodmakers. Consumer groups and labeling activists wanted mandatory labeling in words on the package, not the codes or symbols permitted by the Roberts-Stabenow bill. “We cannot support this proposal because food companies would be permitted to make a GMO disclosure through a means that is unavailable or unfamiliar to many Americans,” said the Environmental Working Group, referring to digital codes.
On a procedural vote, the House cleared the way, 245-183, for action on the GMO disclosure bill. Only three representatives spoke about GMOs during the hour available for debate before the procedural vote, somewhat similar to House passage, 275-150, last July 23 of HR 1599, a pre-emption bill that would have kept labeling voluntary on the federal level.
“The bill the Senate sent over is dumb,” said Rep. Peter Welch, Vermont Democrat. “If you want to label something, use English.”
North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, the Republican pilot for the procedural vote, said the blll allows flexibility to food companies for GMO disclosure. Food prices inevitably would rise if there were conflicting state label laws, she said.
Labeling advocates, such as the Center for Food Safety, said labeling was needed to satisfy the consumer’s right to know about what goes into the food supply. “When President Obama was running for office in 2008, he promised he’d label GMOs as President. This is President Obama’s last chance to get GMO labeling right — by vetoing this sham labeling bill and supporting plain language, mandatory on-package labeling,” said the group.