New UN standards on GM foods a `victory for consumers’

`These standards are a tremendous victory for consumers, for science, for good regulation and for common sense. The food safety officials from dozens of countries who negotiated these documents did critical work on a highly polarised issue,’ stated Julian Edwards, Director-General of Consumers International, which represents more than 250 organisations in 110 countries
The three documents provide guidelines for assessing the safety of GM food plants, such as maize, corn and soybeans, and of GM microorganisms, which are used in beer and cheese production. They provide pages of detailed procedures for determining if a GM food contains new toxins or allergens, is altered nutritionally, or exhibits unexpected effects. They establish a baseline standard that a GMO should be `as safe as the conventional counterpart.’ They also endorse the use of `product tracing’ as a tool of risk management.

Codex standards are important because they can be used to settle trade disputes. The USA has just filed a challenge against the European Union (EU) at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on genetically modified food.

Consumers International sees the Codex standards as strengthening EU countries that seek to regulate GMO safety and to establish traceability systems that will allow tracking in commerce. By 2004, 35 countries (including China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand) covering half the world's population, will require mandatory government safety assessments before GMOs are allowed on the market. However the USA prefers a system of voluntary consultations about safety, where the company developing the seed ultimately decides whether it is safe.

Michael Hansen, representing Consumers International at the Rome meeting, says: `These documents provide a legal basis under WTO rules for the EU’s strong safety regulations for GMOs. They explicitly state that a premarket safety assessment should be undertaken.’

Consumers International views the clause and related footnote on product tracing as a legal justification for the EU traceability system. This was one of the most hotly contested portions of the text. The final text was agreed a year ago at a meeting in Yokohama of the Codex Ad Hoc Intergovernmental Task Force on Food Derived from Biotechnology.

The documents address several key controversies about GM food. They state that:

The transfer of genes from commonly allergenic foods (e.g. peanuts) should be `avoided’ unless it can be proven that the transferred gene does not produce an allergen

Advise against using any antibiotic resistance marker genes in GMOs that create resistance to `clinically used’ antibiotics, a large and growing problem.

The US has said it is challenging the slow pace of the EU's approval system at the WTO, not the system itself. But the US has criticised the EU labelling and traceability proposals on many occasions. It is not yet known exactly what issues the US will raise when it argues its case at the WTO.

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Consumers International

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http://www.consumersinternational.org/news/display.asp?regionid=135&tag=C&id=261&type=news&cat=465&langid=1#