Biotech critic, plant breeder agree on narrow reading of GMO bill
WASHINGTON, July 20, 2016 - The
Agriculture Department is gearing up to implement national GMO disclosure
standards following last week’s overwhelming 306-117 vote that sent the
legislation to President Obama for his signature. No date has been set for
Obama to sign the bill, and critics of biotechnology, including Jesse Jackson,
have been calling on the president to veto it. But his signature is a foregone
conclusion, and USDA has already formed a task force to begin work on the rule
it’s supposed to finalize within two years after the bill’s enactment.
Supporters of the bill who want the
USDA to interpret the law as narrowly as possible can be encouraged that a
leading critic of the industry, the Center for Food Safety (CFS), believes the
standards won’t cover many food ingredients and crop traits. The group, which
opposes the bill, has filed numerous lawsuits over the years to challenge
USDA’s approval of genetically engineered traits.
Doug Gurian-Sherman, CFS’s senior
scientist and director of sustainable agriculture, believes USDA has grounds
for exempting ingredients such as vegetable oils and starches from the
standards. Many crops also may be excluded, depending on the way they were
engineered and the trait itself, he says. He believes USDA’s general counsel
was “blowing smoke” when the official argued in a letter to the Senate that the bill gave the department the
authority to include a broad array of ingredients and traits under the
standards.
At issue is the bill’s definition of
“bioengineered” foods. According to the bill, the foods subject to disclosure
must contain “genetic material” that has been modified through recombinant DNA
techniques. A second part of the definition says that the crop modification
“could not otherwise be obtained through conventional breeding or found in
nature.” The Food and Drug Administration argued in its comments on the bill
that the requirement for genetic material would exclude vegetable oils,
starches and purified proteins from the standards. The agency said it also may
be hard to prove many traits couldn’t be obtained through conventional breeding
or found in nature.
“Clearly, there are things that they
(USDA) will be able to call bioengineered food,” but “you’re not going to find
genetic material, which usually means nucleic acid, in oils and most other
highly refined foods. Just chemically, they’re refined out,” Gurian-Sherman
said.
He said the rest of the definition
appears written to limit the disclosure requirement for transgenic traits that
require inserting a gene or genes from one species into another.
Wayne Parrott, a professor of plant
breeding and genomics at the University of Georgia, agrees that many food
ingredients would be exempt from the disclosure standards. In that sense, the
law is similar to labeling requirements in Japan and Australia, he said.
“There’s
not a laboratory on the planet that can tell the difference between oil from a
GM (genetically modified) soybean and a conventional soybean. There’s
absolutely no way that you can enforce truth in labeling.”
But USDA’s implementation of the
second part of the definition – whether a crop trait could be achieved by
conventional breeding or is found in nature – could be problematic for plant
breeders, depending on how USDA carries it out, according to Parrott.
USDA could write regulations that
require each crop modification to be assessed on a case-by-case basis to
determine whether it’s subject to the disclosure law. The regulations would be
much easier to administer if USDA instead spells out in the rule which
categories of crop modifications would be subject to disclosure and which ones
wouldn’t be, according to Parrott. That way plant breeders would know ahead of
time whether a particular technique and trait would be exempt from disclosure.
Even with unanswered questions about
how USDA will implement the legislation, the bill will still benefit plant
breeders by ensuring that states can no longer require on-package GMO labeling,
he said. The first such law took effect July 1 in Vermont.
Before the congressional action, “we
were headed toward a patchwork of state laws, many of them completely
unrealistic, completely unscientific. It would be impossible for a food company
to get anything to the market at a reasonable cost,” Parrott said.
USDA could be sued over the final
rule, depending on how the regulations come out. But Gurian-Sherman says food
and agribusiness companies may be less concerned about the outcome of the
regulations than labeling advocates such as his group, since the bill allows
the option of digital disclosure rather than on-package labeling. “There’s less
incentive for companies to sue … because they know QR codes are not an
effective way for people to know what’s in their food,” he said.
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