After the showdown vote scheduled for Wednesday in the Senate, the outlook for a GMO-disclosure bill may darken. The Senate bill, which preempts state GMO food-labeling laws along with allowing foodmakers to use a symbol, a digital code or wording on a package to disclose GMO ingredients, has few friends in the House, which has voted against mandatory labeling.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set a cloture vote, a procedural test, on the GMO bill written by Agriculture Committee chairman Pat Roberts and Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the senior Democrat on the committee. Backers need 60 votes for passage. If they succeed, passage of the bill is all but assured. Senators agreed, 68-29, last week to consider the Roberts-Stabenow bill, seen as a sign of support for the bill.
The Senate could vote yet this week on the bill if cloture is invoked. It would limit debate to 30 hours. Passage would send the bill to the House, which voted, 275-150, a year ago for Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo’s bill, HR 1599, to preempt state labeling laws and to leave labeling voluntary on the national level.
“As it stands, the House bill is miles apart from the Roberts-Stabenow compromise bill,” said the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which said that with last week’s Senate vote to consider the GMO-disclosure bill, “the door may be closing on advocates’ ability to influence the bill.”
The labeling campaign was strongest when the issue unexpectedly blossomed into a partisan dispute in the Senate in March, when a pre-emption bill sponsored by Roberts, a Kansas Republican, was defeated in a vote that broke along party lines. In the House, where GMO labeling was a minor issue, pro-label groups made little headway with their argument that consumers deserve to know what’s in their food.
Given the landslide House vote for preemption, Stabenow could be the most prominent proponent for GMO disclosure when Senate and House negotiators meet to reconcile the differences between their bills. For months, she insisted that mandatory GMO disclosure was the price for preemption of state law.
Pompeo had no immediate comment on whether he would support the Roberts-Stabenow bill nor did House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway. Pompeo’s bill was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee before it was referred to the Agriculture Committee.
Congress plans to adjourn for the summer at the end of next week, so there is little time to complete work on a bill and send it to the White House.