President Barack Obama late last month signed into law a bill requiring the labeling of foods with genetically modified organism (GMO) ingredients. The mandatory federal GMO labeling law will supersede all state precedents and put an end to a fight that has raged in the food industry for years.
As passed by the House and Senate, the federal GMO labeling law will require companies to disclose the presence of genetically modified ingredients. Companies will have the option of how they want to do that, which could be done by text, phone number, website link, or QR code that can be read by smartphone.
The law will preempt the Vermont GMO labeling law that went into effect July 1 and required all food sold in the state’s grocery stores be labeled if it contains genetically modified ingredients.
According to a statement by the White House, Senate Bill 764 directs the secretary of agriculture to “establish a national mandatory bio-engineered food disclosure standard.”
Under the new federal law, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has two years to write the rules of the new legislation, which will cover foods created with conventional recombinant DNA techniques. It will not include food products created with CRISPR, a more precise gene-editing technology. Foods coming from livestock like beef, milk, pork, poultry or eggs do not require a GMO label, even if the animal ate feed containing GM corn or soybeans.
The Vermont law, passed in 2014, effectively established the precedent for national labeling on many food products. While the federal law renders all state labeling laws null and void, many companies have already added language to their labels to meet Vermont’s rule rather than having to write multiple separate labels for different states. Campbell’s was the first major company to say it will label all of its products and General Mills, ConAgra, Mars and Kellogg’s followed suit. Most recently, Dannon announced that it would label all of its food products containing GMOs.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of the federal GMO legislation was the fear that each state would end up passing different laws, making the situation confusing for consumers and burdensome for businesses.
But, proponents of labeling are not satisfied with the bill that has been signed into law. The bill imposes no penalties for noncompliance, and it may leave many genetically engineered ingredients exempt from labeling. Additionally, the labeling options that the law offers companies include listing a QR code or directing the consumer to a website, which many feel would discriminate against the elderly and low income families, among others, who don’t have access to smart phones or the internet. The Vermont law would have required a plain language statement on the package itself, which labeling advocates says is important for making GMOs clearly identifiable in foods.
Also of concern to labeling proponents is the definition set out in the new bill for determining which foods would require labels. Challenges are expected to follow as the USDA begins to establish standards for GMO labeling. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees most food labeling in the country, criticizes the assignment of regulatory responsibility to the USDA, which usually only gets involved with the labeling of meat and eggs. The FDA also contends that definition of bioengineering in the bill is too narrow in its scope, saying that, as written, the bill’s language would exempt foods containing oils and sweeteners that, after being processed, no longer contain any genetic trace of the modified crops they were made from. However, the USDA said it would be able to require labels on products containing such ingredients. The USDA says that, in total, it would require labeling on 24,000 more products than are currently covered under the Vermont law, which exempts things like cheese, which is often processed with a genetically modified enzyme, and meats and foods containing meat.
According to the Associated Press, 75 to 80 percent of foods have genetically modified ingredients, mostly made from corn or soy. The FDA has said that GMOs are safe to eat, but supporters of labeling argue that not enough is known about GMOs and their long-term effects and consumers should know what is in their food. Sixty-four other countries already have laws requiring foods containing GMOs to be labeled.
The fight against GMO labeling has been long and expensive. Food and biotech companies spent in the neighborhood of $100 million to fight it in 2015 alone, according to advocacy group Environmental Working Group, which favors labeling. State labeling proposals were defeated in California, Colorado and Oregon, but many food industry executives believed the proposals would eventually gain favor with the public as their research has shown that most consumers say they want to know if their food contains GMOs.
After the Vermont law was passed in 2014, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the biotech industry challenged the law in court, but by the time a judge ruled in favor of the state’s labeling law, many companies had already started to work on complying with the law.
