The long fight over labeling GMO food will continue into the new year despite a last-ditch push by the food industry for Congress to pre-empt state label laws. The omnibus federal funding bill, a must-pass bill before Congress can adjourn for the year, was silent on GMOs, according to a farm-group official, which means no change in current law. Leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations committees did not mention GMO labeling in their summaries of the $1.15-trillion bill, but did mention dozens of other policy riders, including repeal of a U.S. program that requires packages of meat to say where the animals were born, raised and slaughtered. Text of the bill was not immediately available early today.
The nation’s first GMO food-labeling law is scheduled to take effect on July 1 in Vermont. The food industry has pressed Congress to pass legislation that bars state labeling laws, keeps labeling voluntary on the federal level and puts USDA in charge of certifying foods as GMO or non-GMO. The House passed a pre-emption bill during the summer but it stalled in the Senate. Proponents of labeling say Americans have a right to know what’s in their food. The food industry says GMOs are safe, so special labels would be misleading.
Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts said the funding bill included repeal of mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL), which he said would avert $1.01 billion in retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico on U.S. manufactured and food products. “I’m pleased American agriculture and businesses will escape these tariffs,” said Roberts. While Canada and Mexico have threatened retaliation, their true goal was elimination of COOL on beef and pork. The WTO ruled that COOL unfairly discourages import of foreign hogs, cattle and meat.
The bill would block any reduction in salt standards for school foods “until supported by scientific studies” and would allow leeway on serving whole grains to schools that demonstrate difficulty in obtaining the products, said a House summary of the bill. Congress has put similar relief language into previous funding bills. The omnibus bill provides $22.1 billion for child-nutrition programs such as school lunch although Congress did not reauthorize the programs this year.
Grocery stores and food retailers would be given an additional year to comply with menu labeling regulations. The omnibus bill also revived so-called commodity certificates which, according to the House summary of the omnibus bill, give farmers “control of their own crops instead of having to forfeit them to USDA during hard times.” Critics say the certificates allow farmers to evade crop subsidy limits.
Lawmakers would give an additional $250 million to the Food for Peace program to address the refugee crisis in the Middle East and other food crises. Food for Peace is the major U.S. food aid program and would receive $1.7 billion for this fiscal year.
The bill also effectively bans horse slaughter in the United States for this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2016, said Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the Democratic leader on the Senate Appropriations Committee