Mary McDonald, co-owner of a three-employee sauce-making company in New Hampshire, says she’ll put hundreds of hours into researching ingredients in order to comply with the GMO food-labeling law that takes effect in neighboring Vermont on July 1.
“It’s quite a chain [of origin] and quite a process,” McDonald told the Manchester Union Leader, which reports that across the Granite State, as well as in the national U.S. food market, companies that sell their products in Vermont are feeling the effect of the new law. “Here in the Granite State, some companies are bemoaning the added costs they say Vermont’s law will impose, while others laud its intent.”
The New Hampshire Legislature rejected a GMO-label law earlier this year. The dairy products company HP Hood, with a plant in Concord, says if other New England states enact label laws, it would be “nearly impossible” to satisfy all the regulations. Even Vermont’s law is “quite a cumbersome project,” says a company spokeswoman. The owner of Francestown Village Foods, in Milford, said withdrawing from Vermont was a more likely outcome than changing the labels on the gourmet frozen meals that the company sells in nine states.
“Many New Hampshire companies that already exclude genetically modified ingredients from their products are hailing Vermont’s law as a step in the right direction,” said the Union Leader. Owner Dawn Hurt of Cucina Aurora, an all-natural specialty foods company, said she needed only to sign a few papers to satisfy the Vermont law.
In an editorial, the Boston Globe called for defeat of a GMO-labeling bill in the state legislature, saying, “It would amount to additional regulation that serves no public interest and does nothing to protect the health of Massachusetts residents.” The editorial also said the U.S. Senate should reconsider its rejection earlier this month of a bill to pre-empt state label laws and keep labeling voluntary nationally.
Like laws in Connecticut and Maine, the Massachusetts bill would come into force if several neighboring states adopt similar legislation. In Maine, the statehouse sent to the Senate a bill for a statewide referendum to put the labeling law into effect now, rather than wait for neighboring states to act, reports New Hampshire Public Radio.
The anti-labeling group Coalition for Safe and Affordable Food, speaking for farm groups and the food industry, told Reuters that odds were against an acceptable solution this year. “The Senate is in danger of ceding control of labeling for a nation of 300 million to a state of only 600,000 people,” said the group.