Vermont-Driven GMO Labeling Could Have Troubling Unintended Consequences

This small state may soon alter the food supply for all Americans

(This post originally appeared on Forbes on 3/26/16)

Over the past week and a half, Mars, General Mills, ConAgra Foods and Kellogg announced that they had decided to start labeling whether their products contain GMOs nationwide, in compliance with a pending Vermont statute. They see this as a way to avoid the cost of maintaining multiple systems for different states.

These companies clearly state that they agree with the scientific consensus that there are no safety issues with biotechnology as it has been applied to crops. Nonetheless, many observers believe that the ultimate impact of the Vermont labeling law will be to encourage companies to seek to use more non-GMO ingredients. That would, of course, be a major victory for the organizations that have promoted labeling and who are actually quite transparent about their agenda of eliminating use of the technology all together.

However this scenario plays out, there are three interesting questions to consider.

1. Why do so many consumers say they want GMO labeling?
2. Why was anyone against labeling in the first place?
3. What might be the long-term effects of this labeling requirement on our food supply?

Why do so many consumers say they want GMO labeling?

This has much to do with how you ask the question.  The term "GMO" is a misleading title made up by anti-GMO activists in Europe in the mid 1990s.  It stands for "Genetically Modified Organism," which isn't a very good term to use since virtually every crop and animal used for food today has had its genetics dramatically modified from what ever it once was in the wild.  However, since few consumers realize this, the term "GMO" has the negative emotive effect that was intended.

The genetic modifications of these plants were vastly 

more dramatic than any modern “GMO crop”

If you use emotive language to ask people about other scary-sounding foods, you can get the same reaction. I've asked many people, "do you think cloned fruit should be labeled?" Virtually everyone says "yes!" Then I explain that all fruit is "cloned" in the sense that it is vegetatively propagated by budding or from cuttings because if you grew it from seed you wouldn't get the same variety. People have been doing this for millennia, but if I use the emotive term "cloned" I can get a "label it" response.

I also sometimes ask, "do you think that food grown with products made from animal excrement should be labeled?"  Most people again say "yes" because I used an emotive term. In that case there is a small, but finite food safety risk associated with manures and composts, but we don't label it.

In any case, after 20 years of active efforts to create fear around plant biotechnology, the label is nearly guaranteed to be seen as a negative by many consumers. Again, that is exactly what certain parties hope.

Why was anyone against labeling in the first place?

On the surface this seems like a logical question, but there were rational reasons to oppose these labels. The FDA wants to reserve the exercise of its labeling authority for things with real, documented risk issues such as food allergies, not for something like biotech crops for which extensive studies show no unique risk.  Realistically, this has become a moot point. By allowing "non-GMO" and "GMO-free" labels, consumers are already being successfully recruited to buy this next example of "non-existence" food, following trends like "gluten-free," "fat-free," "zero cholesterol" and the like.  American consumers are so used to buying food for what it is not that we don't even see the absurdity.

Much of the non-GMO labeling is for products
from crops which have no commercial biotech versions anyway

The reason that the processed food industry opposed labeling for biotech crops has to do with the costs and liabilities associated with maintaining distinct product flows in these very large scale, very low profit margin businesses. It costs money to clean out all the equipment, bins, trains and trucks used for bulk handling.

Grain harvesting equipment and later handling 

are not conducive to easy segregation

Depending on tolerances, it also opens companies up to liabilities for "adventitious presence.”  In the absence of real risk, the costs just don’t make sense. “Identity preservation” of high value crops like apples, oranges or wine grapes is far more feasible, and it is routinely done, but for issues that matter like variety, appellation etc.

What might be long-term effects of labeling on the food supply?

This really depends on whether food companies have the courage to trust their customers enough to continue to use biotech-improved items even in the face of activist pressure. Will they stand-up for their decision (as the Girl Scouts have), or will they give in and start shifting to non-GMO ingredients?

Evidence suggest that many players will take the latter path and that will mean asking farmers to forgo crop traits that they have found to be very helpful. Returning to non-biotech will also make it harder for farmers to use environmentally-sound approaches like minimum-tillage. It will increase the need to spray for insect pests once controlled by Bt traits in the crops. The cost of those non-GMO ingredients will be higher, partly because of these disadvantages, but also because of what it will take to "identity preserve" the non-GMO harvest all the way down the handling, storage and processing stream.

Of greater concern is the possibility that food companies will be tempted to source cheaper version of these non-GMO ingredients from other countries. This has happened all too often for organic.  That will open up the U.S. consumer to environmental pollutants (e.g. heavy metals) and to pesticides that have long been banned here, but which are still made and used in places like China and India.  It will also mean getting items from regions that are much less attuned to the need to detect and exclude dangerous mycotoxins from the food supply.

If Vermont ends up initiating a trend towards more non-GMO products, we should be asking participating food companies to go on record promising that they won't import the ingredients if they are available from the U.S. or other countries that enjoy a general context of sound environmental, food safety, and pesticide regulation. Without such assurances, we could have a serious case of unintended consequences.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com

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GMO Foods: To Label Or Not To Label?

(This post first appeared on Science 2.0, 8/21/12)

This fall, California voters will be asked to vote on Proposition 37, a law which would require that all foods including “GMO Crop ingredients” be labeled as such.   There are many reasons that this isn’t a good use of governmental authority for mandatory food labeling.  A look at historical logic and precedents for labeling, and at the misleading messages this initiative would foster, should inspire Californians to reject it at the ballot box.

Labeling for a Known Hazard

If a food is hazardous to some consumers, but not others (e.g. peanut allergy), then it makes sense to require that it be labeled to protect that minority.  If a food contains something generally hazardous, but difficult to immediately remove from the food supply, it makes sense to label those foods as well (e.g. trans-fats for which labeling was required after 2006).   If a particular GMO crop were to be found to be hazardous to certain people, or people in general, the appropriate response would to ban the use of that particular trait nationally, not to label it at a state level.  No such hazard has been documented for dozens of biotech crops crop traits over 16 years of extensive commercialization, so “hazard” has never been a reason to require labeling of a GMO crop. 

Labeling For Lack of Safety Studies

The proponents of Proposition 37 argue that because the FDA does not require a set of specific human safety studies prior to commercialization, consumer need to be warned. Considering the diversity of biotech traits, it does not really make sense to specify a particular battery of safety studies.  They would really need to be varied on a trait-by-trait basis.  The opponents of these crops imply that these foods are thus, untested when it comes to safety.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Both the companies that produce the crops, and a wide range of independent researchers, have studied GMO crop safety for years.  Highly qualified scientific panels have reviewed those data and consistently concluded that these improved crops represent no unusual risk compared to crops improved by traditional methods. Indeed, "Nature" seems to make similar genetic modifications.

Ironically, the largest single contributor to the pro-labeling effort is the internet “health advisor,” Dr. Mercola whose $800,000 donation was funded by his thriving, natural supplement business.  There is very little regulatory oversight for that multi-billion dollar supplement industry in terms of required testing either human safety or product efficacy.  When it comes to safety testing, GMO crops are far more intensively scrutinized than something like Dr. Mercola’s supplements.

Labeling Because Other Countries Require It

One argument for requiring labeling has been that places like Europe, Japan and China do so.  First of all, most of the ingredients in the US, human food supply that come from GMO crops (corn starch; high fructose corn syrup, soybean, cotton seed or canola oil…) have always been supplied from different crops in other regions (potato or rice starch, beet or cane sugar, sunflower, peanut or rapeseed oil…) so there are actually very few GMO labeled foods in those countries.  They import massive amounts of our GMO crops for animal feed, but that is not labeled.  Second of all, the scientific review panels in these other countries have come to the same conclusions as those in the US.  They find no reason to doubt the overall safety of GMO-based foods.  It is just that politics trumps science in those political systems.  That is certainly not something we should imitate.

Labeling Because It Is A Consumer’s “Right to Know.”

Bits of information do not actually become “knowledge” unless they can be placed into a meaningful context.  We have a historical example of this with the mandatory food composition labeling that has been required in the US since 1990.  The calorie, protein, fat, carbohydrate and vitamin content of foods could theoretically be useful information that consumers could “know.”  Unfortunately, when Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, it never actually funded the education part (imagine that).  For most consumers, the information on food products is not part of a functional knowledge-base that could guide their food decisions.  Instead, they are left to be influenced by the advertizing messages and ever-changing food fads that shape our “marketing of non-existence” food culture.  Proposition 37 does not include any sort of official educational component,. It would just mandate that a bit of information, “contains ingredients from crops modified by genetic engineering” be attached to many foods.  The contextualization of that information will be heavily influenced, not by any sort of balanced presentation, but by a range of activist groups, aggressive organic marketers, and fear-based marketers like Dr. Mercola.   This will not be anything new as these groups have been flooding the internet with hyperbolic warnings for more than a decade.  One might think that there would be a statute-of-limitations on saying that “the sky is falling.”  It is not at all surprising that Mercola and others would like the opportunity to ramp up the level of societal fear with the help of the “information” supplied by California law.  (By the way, Dr. Mercola has not just promoted fear of GMOs.  He has been a conduit for anti-vaccination activists and even for a “doctor” with the theory that all cancers are fungal infections.  His consistent message is, “Be afraid! Buy my products”).

Labeling As A Way To Track The Effects of GMO Foods

Another argument that Prop-37 supporters make is that labeling will allow us to better track or detect any issues with these foods.  Other than the fact that there is no obvious mechanism for that to happen, there is another major problem with the argument.  Foods purchased in restaurants would not be labeled under Prop-37.  Considering that on average people eat about half of their meals out, and that many mostly eat out, this idea of tracking falls apart.  The other implication of this exemption is that the information on grocery items (which will be cast in a scary light by Mercola et al), will not be seen in restaurants, including those that serve fast food, fried in GMO vegetable oils and sweetened with GMO corn-based sweeteners.  Making home meals sound scary and restaurant meals sound safer hardly sounds like a smart message to be sending to a population with an obesity problem.

Labeling To Allow Some Consumers To Avoid GMO Foods

Some people may never trust the scientific/regulatory consensus.  That is OK, but those folks don’t really need to force mandatory labeling for everyone else.  They always have the option to buy Organic, which decided not to use GMO long before it was even an option.  These folks also always have the option to buy products that are sold as or even certified as non-GMO – something that is allowed already.  Anyone can also learn a few simple rules based on the limited number of crops that are GMO in the first place. Here are the simple rules: If the product has ingredients that are derived from Corn, Soy, Cotton, Canola, or Sugar beets, just assume it is probably includes biotech varieties since farmers of those crops overwhelmingly choose those option.  Right now, the only fresh market GMO crops in the US are papayas from Hawaii (virus resistance developed by Cornell University that saved the crop), and some sweet corn. In the rare case of another biotech crop being added to this list, there is always plenty of official notice and press/blog coverage. 

Labeling to Allow Consumers to Intentionally Choose Biotech Improved Foods

Within a few years there may be some biotech-based, non-browning apples on the market, but they will be voluntarily labeled as such because it is a positive consumer feature and because that value chain is amenable to full identity preservation down to the sticker on each fruit.  This is the most logical form of GMO crop labeling, and there are no regulatory or legal barriers to such labels.

Conclusion

Mandatory food labeling should be reserved for well-documented public health needs and should be linked to viable public education efforts.  It shouldn’t be something designed to enrich fear-based marketers or to give people a false comparison of at home and restaurant foods.

You are welcome to comment here or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com

Classic California License Plate from WoodysWorld1778

            

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