Fed Budget Bill: Two Wins, One Loss for Food Labeling

The $1.1 trillion Federal spending bill passed by Congress this week includes a two minor wins for advocates of GMO labeling, but a significant loss for anyone concerned about food safety standards and the environmental costs of food transport.

First, the good news: Congress jettisoned a provision that would have prohibited state legislatures from passing or implementing their own GMO labeling laws, in favor of creating a single national review board to assess the safety of genetically-modified ingredients. The bill was officially called the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act,” but GMO critics refer to it as the Deny Americans the Right to Know (DARK) act.

The new budget bill also mandates that the Food and Drug Administration issue final guidelines for the labeling of the genetically-modified salmon species that the agency approved for market in November. The bill allocates a whopping $150,000 to fund the labeling guideline project and to implement a consumer disclosure program. (UpShots sincerely trusts that the commissioners will use discretion and not blow that $150K on wild Alaskan salmon caviar at their planning luncheons).

Big Food manufacturers and retailers have voiced disappointment over the non-passage of the “Safe” act. By leaving the field open to individual state initiatives, Congress is fostering “a patchwork of costly and misleading state labeling mandates,” says Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a massive food industry lobbying group that has been strongly opposed to GMO labeling.

On the near horizon is the implementation in January of the State of Vermont’s GMO labeling mandate, which was approved by the Green Mountain state’s legislature in 2014. Bailey has indicated that her constituents are less-than-happy about having to comply.

But they can console themselves by knowing that the budget bill nixed a requirement that all imported meat products be labeled with country-of-origin information. That’s a big loss on the transparency front, because it means that companies and retailers will not be required to disclose where the meat was grown, harvested or processed. Lawmakers say they took that decision in order to avoid punitive tarriffs from other countries (ie China) that opposed country-of-origin labeling.

It’s a pretty safe bet that the omnibus budget bill is packed with pork. But, alas, we will not be able to know where it came from.

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