March Against Monsanto

[Mike Henderson]

Let me make a comment about labeling food as GMO. Some years back, California passed Prop 65 which required stores to post a sign warning that some products they carried may contain chemicals "known to the state of California" to cause cancer, birth defects, and so on. I'm sure the intent was to get stores to quit carrying products with those chemicals.

However, what actually happened is that every store posted the sign at their entrance, whether they carried the products or not, just to make sure they couldn't get sued if they did carry such a product. And people who enter the store just ignore the sign.

So let's look at corn, which in one way or another (see high fructose corn syrup) finds it's way into a whole lot of products. It's impossible to carry corn in bulk without having some GMO corn mixed in. So if mandatory labeling comes into effect, just about every product will have a label on it saying "May contain GMO ingredients" and no one will pay attention to it except the people who are radical about it. Non GMO products will be available, but because of the special handling and testing, they'll be much more expensive and, again, the only people who will buy them will be the radicals.

You see this effect now with peanuts (not GMO peanuts, plain peanuts). Companies mark their product as "may contain small amounts of peanuts or peanut products, or may have been processed on equipment that also processes peanut products." That's just a way of protecting themselves from liability.

Unless GMO food is shown to be unsafe - and then it probably won't be able to be sold - labeling it is useless, but will open the door to lawyers who will sue everyone in the food chain for any violation of the labeling.

Mike

[If there's a market for non-GMO food, companies will produce it and label the product as "Non-GMO" Those people who are concerned about GMO food can vote with their dollars and buy that product. That way, the free market will decide about labeling of food and there won't be a feast for the attorneys.]