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Vermont GMO Food Labeling Bill One Step From Becoming Law

Christina Herrick Posted by Christina Herrick|April 28, 2014

Do you think GMO labeling standards should be mandated?

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The Vermont House of Representatives passed a bill last week that would likely make Vermont the first state to require labeling of foods that contains generically-modified organisms.

“I am proud of Vermont for being the first state in the nation to ensure that Vermonters will know what is in their food. The Legislature has spoken loud and clear through its passage of this bill,” said Governor Peter Shumulin in a statement following the bill’s passing. “I wholeheartedly agree with them and look forward to signing this bill into law.”

Labeling will go into effect July 1, 2016, and the Vermont Attorney General’s Office will oversee the rules surrounding the labeling on packaging.

Vermont House Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Partridge said “Our constituents have spoken. They feel it’s important to know what’s in their food.”

Unlike bills passed in Maine and Connecticut which will go into effect if other states pass similar measures, Vermont’s bill requires labeling independently of other state’s policies.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association is considering a lawsuit against the state for unconstitutional infringement of the companies’ free speech.

Click here to read more about Vermont’s bill.

Meanwhile, a bill that would invalidate the legislation pending in Vermont and measures already passed in Connecticut and Maine, was introduced into the U.S. House earlier this month. The bill by Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., and G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., would ban states from passing food labeling laws, according to an article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

A food labeling bill is also being considered in Minnesota, home to General Mills, which has a lot of products that contain GMOs. General Mills approves the U.S. House bill and national labeling standards, and joined in the efforts to defeat food labeling bills in California and Washington, which cost the food industry $69 million.

“A patchwork of labels that would differ from state to state based on differing state-based standards would be confusing and costly for companies and consumers alike,” General Mills Vice President Tom Forsythe told the Star Tribune. “The national organic standard is an excellent model, in our view. Organic certification and labeling standards were established at the national level — not state by state — and certified organic means the same thing everywhere you shop.”

Consumer groups have formed Just Label It, gathering 1.4 million signatures calling for labeling rules similar to those passed in Europe.

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune and Burlington Free Press reports

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Christina Herrick is former Editor of American Fruit Grower magazine and Western Fruit Grower magazine, published by Meister Media Worldwide. See all author stories here.

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Avatar for Matt Matt says:
April 30, 2014 at 10:53 am

General Mills is already preparing for this labeling. They are introducing Cherrios that are GMO free. All of the food companies know that the public does not want GMOs in their food. Updating labels to say “May contain one or more ingredients may be genetically modified”. Boom, done. There is virtually ZERO cost to the industry to do this. They print promos on their packing labels all of the time.

What they fear is consumer backlash and loss of sales. This one issue will give a lot of smaller companies an edge to steal marketshare. Why do you think the big food companies have been spending billions of dollars buying up the small organic producers? They KNOW this labeling will come at some point. They KNOW that in Europe people reject products with GMOs 9 out of 10 times.

I am very happy to see this labeling law being passed in Vermont. I hope it causes many more states to take action and forces the industry to add GMO information to the label.

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Avatar for Stu Stu says:
April 30, 2014 at 1:30 pm

You are preying off of people’s fears created by organic producers and the media. What scientific evidence do you have that GMO’s have ever injured or sickened anyone? I have never found that evidence. Everything is “testimonial” based or hearsay. Nothing scientific. Do you eat ice cream or know anyone with diabetes that takes insulin? Both are GMO based. They have become a part of life. Do you want to go back to making insulin the old fashioned way? Boom, done.

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Avatar for Matt Matt says:
May 1, 2014 at 2:55 pm

The Ice Cream I eat is produced by Castle Rock Organic Creamery in Castle Rock, Wisconsin. There is ZERO GMO in their REAL ice cream. There is also Sassy Cow Creamery in Sun Prairie, WI. That is also not GMO. Both of these are family farms that have on farm creameries. They are very popular in the local groceries. We also get our Organic milk from Sassy Cow (Which is all grass fed by the way).

Scientific studies PROVE that grass fed dairy is healthier for you than conventional dairy. There is no GMO involved in most of the Wisconsin farmer owned dairies.

I don’t fill my belly with Sugar and other highly processed starchy foods on a daily basis. My A1C numbers prove that my blood sugar is normal.

You are reacting in a biased way towards the propaganda fed to you by big agriculture. There is a revolving door in US government where people move between working for big agriculture and the government. I don’t fully trust our Government to tell the truth. Do you know that NO long term studies have been done on GMO foods by our government? Only 90 or 120 day studies on the acute safety effects of GMOs.

French scientists ran a multi-year study on rats that are specifically used to determine if a product will cause tumors or other problems. They used three sets of rats. The control group was fed conventional corn and the others GMO corn and conventional laced with Roundup. The GMO fed group had a large increase in the number of tumors that they developed during the length of the study vs. the control group.

“Almost all of the ill effects manifested AFTER 90 days. By the end of the study, 50 to 80 percent of the females had developed large tumors, compared with 30 percent developing tumors in the control group. In males, liver congestion and necrosis were 2.5 to 5.5 times higher than in the control group, and there were 1.3 to 2.3 times more instances of kidney disease. Overall, among the rats receiving GM corn and/or Roundup, up to 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group.

Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/natural-health/gmo-safety-zmgz13amzsto.aspx#ixzz30UV8gvc2
”

Remember that these are rats used to specifically determine if there is a cause/effect relationship between the control and study groups. The rats develop tumors easily which makes them a good choice to test with. They are very sensitive to changes in their diet and other environmental effects that manifest in tumors and other bodily changes. This allows scientists to easily see changes between a control group and a test group.

I am sure you will discount this study as it did not come from big agriculture or our revolving door at the USDA and FDA (both of which do not do their own studies and base their findings on industry sponsored studies).

What scares the industry is that they KNOW that once labeling goes into effect the general public will reject GMOs. When laws in Europe demanded GMO labeling 90% of the public rejected GMOs. Even China is rejecting some of our GMO corn. Imagine, the Chinese rejecting US grown corn because they consider it unsafe for THEIR people.

It is about time that consumers have a CHOICE in knowing WHAT ingredients are in their food and HOW it was produced.

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Avatar for ellen ellen says:
May 1, 2014 at 8:07 am

I’m betting the public (although they have been lead to fear something they don’t understand) really wants healthy, affordable, nutritious food! As food becomes more expensive the option of going hungry or eating an apple that has been modified will lose it’s appeal. Whether a trait is introduced by conventional breeding or spliced in will matter less and less down the road. Splicing is just a quicker means of getting that trait in there. There are new technologies on the horizon that will make the current splicing obsolete and the question will become moot anyway. I work in the industry and field calls from growers, mind you, who do not understand that F1 hybrid does not mean GMO. I am constantly explaining to growers what conventional breeding means, so if small growers are confused just imagine how little the general public understands and it is so easy to scare people with what they don’t understand.

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Avatar for Matt Matt says:
May 1, 2014 at 3:25 pm

Splicing is NOT just a quicker means of getting the trait “in there”. What “splicing” allows is moving genes between organisms that would never be allowed in nature. There is no “natural” way to move a Gene that codes for Cry1A or Cry1C in BT soil bacteria to a plant.

Normal hybridization is done sexually between plants that are sexually compatible. This type of plant breeding is fully natural. A tomato can not cross pollinate a pepper, even though they are very close genetically. Nature does not allow for it.

Bringing a new GMO trait to market requires almost as much time as traditional hybridization. The only difference is that scientists can artificially insert genes or modify the dna structure in ways that nature would never allow.

New techniques in traditional breeding (not GMO) allow for the scientists to use marker proteins to determine if a wanted gene is preset in the plant or not. If it is, then that plant is selected for further cross breeding to naturally guide the transfer of wanted traits into the new plant. This significantly speeds up the movement of wanted traits without ANY of the downsides of artificial gene insertion. Essentially, when a specific gene is preset in a plant it codes for a unique protein. The plants, while still immature, can be tested to see if the protein exists. Protein tests are fast, simple and cheap. Those that have the protein are selected to allow them to mature, those that do not have it are destroyed. This allows for multiple generations of plants to be bred in a single year, vs. having to wait for the full plant lifecycle to complete to see if the trait was present.

You can NOT use this process to move genes from other organisms. That technology will always be restricted to GMO techniques as nature will not allow it to happen.

What MOST people fail to realize is that CMS (Cytoplasmic Male Sterility) is now being used in many traditional breeding lines (supposedly NON-GMO). This is done to make the “female” plants “male sterile”. The prevents the “female” plants from pollinating with their own line. They can only be pollinized by the “Male” line and this means the resulting seed crop is more uniform. All of the seeds from the cross pollination will have genes from the “female” and “male” lines.

What they DON’T tell you is that CMS exists naturally in very few plants. It is a way for those plants to preserve some genetic uniqueness. The scientists have used GMO techniques like “nuclear fusion” to transfer the CMS trait from Radish to Broccoli, etc. This would NEVER be allowed in nature to happen. The USDA then said this is NOT a GMO organism, even though the rest of the world classifies nuclear fusion as genetic modification.

The USDA went further and classified CMS as being allowed in Organic agriculture in the US. The funny thing is that CMS is specifically banned in organic agriculture in the rest of the world as it is classified as GMO. I, personally, believe that this change in the definition of what “Organic” means in the US was due to a strong push by seed breeders to allow the change.

You see CMS is also used as a way to “lock up” genetics so that a trait in a new seed line is not easily transferred to another breeders lines. The progeny of plants that had CMS parents is also male sterile. CMS is less about uniform plant stand and more about protecting intellectual property (patenting life). The “old” method of isolating genes in a plant for breeding is called “Selfing”. This is where a plant is bred to itself until it becomes so inbred that it is unable to breed with itself. This process took 7-10 generations to achieve. Once “selfing” was completed the plant could be crossed with another line that was selfed and the hope was that the desired traits would be present in the new seed line.

So you now understand why traditional hybridization took so long to achieve results. The new technique of using marker proteins for desired traits means we can skip the whole time to create self infertile plants. We can use guided selection to get the traits we want.

Sort of like saying if both parents have blue eyes then we KNOW that the children will have a good chance of having blue eyes as that trait is recessive and both parents must have at LEAST one allele that codes for blue eyes. The child, if they have blue eyes, will have either both copies of the gene that code for blue eyes or one for blue and one for a recessive trait. In this way we could selectively naturally breed people to only have blue eyes. The genetics are NOT hard to understand.

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Avatar for Michelle Ferrarese Michelle Ferrarese says:
May 1, 2014 at 9:46 pm

I would think any grower or food processor, or purveyor of ANY product, should be proud enough of what they are selling to be willing to label it. It may be true that in the [near?] future, access to fresh food at all will be so limited that consumers will happily eat GM food (rather than go hungry), but that’s NOT the case currently. All GMOs are not the same- a reader commented about insulin– an excellent example of something no one would argue against. Insulin is produced in a controlled, contained environment, NOT in an agricultural field without barriers to surrounding ecosystems. I think the real threats from GM products are not to human health (eaters) but to entire ecosystems (the unknown and known threats to farm fields and surrounding land, as well as beyond), to organic farmers (specifically the certainty of Bt-resistant pests evolving as a result of incredible, artificial selection pressure via the pervasiveness of Bt-crops), and to the ability of anyone BUT Monsanto to compete in the free market for crop improvement– they are profit- and only-profit-motivated, and have enough capital and political power to essentially squash anyone who competes or threatens them.

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Avatar for Demetria Demetria says:
May 2, 2014 at 6:46 pm

The other big problem is that GMOs are made to be sprayed with pesticides/and herbicides, so in the unlikely event that they would ever be proven safe, the stuff they are meant to be sprayed with should be proven safe too. Unlikely, of course since a recent study just showed roundup to be likely to be the cause of rare fatal kidney disease and in Argentina the incidence of birth defects where is heavily sprayed is outrageously high. There is no proof of GMOs producing more, or better in drought conditions. They have been shown to encourage the development of superweeds and superbugs, though. But, even if none of this were true…I would still want to know you sold it to me. Why would you be allowed to sell me something without telling me what you are selling me????

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