Thursday, June 23, 2016

U.S. Senate has a GMO bill



The United States Senate has a bill that would regulate labelling of foods containing genetically-modified crops.
It still faces a few hurdles before it becomes law, such as meshing it with a different bill passed by the House of Representatives
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Nor will it undo the Vermont legislation, the first in the nation to make GMO labelling compulsory.

But no other states will be allowed to pass GMO labelling legislation and regulations, meaning food-processing companies will have one set of standards to follow for distribution and sales.

Unless we act now, Vermont law denigrating biotechnology and causing confusion in the marketplace is the law of the land,” Republican Senator Pat Roberts from Kansas who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in a prepared statement.

Our marketplace--both consumers and producers--needs a national biotechnology standard to avoid chaos in interstate commerce,” Roberts said.

The Vermont law takes effect July 1, which has been a looming deadline for months for food manufacturers and lawmakers.

As many consumer groups advocated, the proposed Senate bill would require food manufacturers to say if a food contains genetically modified ingredients. However, consumers who are concerned about GMOs may have to do some extra sleuthing when they read a product’s label, which can disclose the GM foods through text, a symbol, website link or QR code.

There are a few exceptions to the labeling proposal. Foods that consist primarily of beef, poultry, pork or eggs would not be required to have a GM label, even if they ate GM corn or soybeans. “The legislation prohibits the Secretary of Agriculture from considering any food product derived from an animal to be bioengineered solely because the animal may have eaten bioengineered feed,” the Senate statement noted.

The bill also does not apply to foods created with emerging gene editing technologies such as CRISPR, but rather focuses on foods that have been developed through conventional recombinant DNA techniques.