BOISE—A joint memorial from the Idaho Legislature to Congress urging the federal government to create a national policy for the labeling of genetically engineered foods has passed a House committee.
The memorial asks Congress to have the Food and Drug Administration create federal standards for companies that want to voluntarily label food products that do not contain genetically engineered ingredients.
This would accommodate both those who want to label their food products as not having GE ingredients and those who don’t, its author, Rep. Steven Miller, a Republican farmer from Fairfield, told members of the House Agricultural Affairs Committee.
“I think it’s a good compromise that way in allowing both sides of the issue to find some middle ground,” he said. “It meets the needs of both sides.”
The memorial says that foods produced with GE ingredients “are as safe to eat and grow as foods produced without GE ingredients” and adds that “GE technology adds desirable traits from nature, establishing the potential for nutritional, health, agronomic and environmental benefits.”
It still needs to be approved by the full House and Senate,
The memorial is supported by most of the state’s largest agricultural groups and was also vetted by national farm organizations, said Doug Jones, an Idaho farmer who is executive director of Growers for Biotechnology.
Jones said it’s better to have the federal government develop labeling standards for GE foods rather than states or cities.
The memorial says a patchwork of local and state mandatory labeling laws would result in costly changes to manufacturing, labeling, warehousing, inventory and distribution channels that would result in higher food prices.
“There’s a common-sense business reason not to do it state-by-state,” Jones said. “If we’re going to have labeling, let’s do it right, at the federal level with common standards.”
“It’s better to have one national policy rather than 50 individual ones,” said Brent Olmstead, executive director of Milk Producers of Idaho, which supports the memorial.
An effort by Idaho’s sugarbeet industry to introduce a bill that would have made it Idaho law to recognize federal pre-emption on the issue of GE labeling will not happen this year, said Rupert farmer Duane Grant, chairman of the Snake River Sugar Co-op.
That bill would have prevented individual Idaho counties from passing GE labeling laws.
Grant said Idaho’s sugar industry would have preferred the pre-emption bill but he said the memorial is “well-written and ... it will take us a long ways down the road we want to go.”
Miller said a key point of the memorial is that it asks FDA to create standards for voluntary labeling of GE products.
“You’re not required to label,” he said. “The market will work this out.”
Florida has passed a similar memorial, North Dakota is in the process and several other states are discussing it, Miller said.
Source: www.capitalpress.com