Vermont is in a food fight with the U.S. Congress. Needless to say, VT will lose

[cali]

Thursday it was reported that the Senate’s Agriculture Committee leadership has reached a deal on labeling GMO foods, specifically to block states from requiring clear, on-package labels of GMO foods.

This agreement fails to provide any meaningful federal labeling requirement. This is not a food-labeling bill. This is a rollback of democracy at the behest of the world’s largest agribusiness and biotech corporations.

This deal can still be described as the Denying Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act because it will ensure that most consumers won’t know how their food is produced. Vermont’s law, which is about to go into effect, and with which many companies are already complying, would give consumers clear, on-package labels.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/06/25/dark-act-compromise-could-preempt-vermonts-gmo-label-law


GMO labels: The great American food fight


Montpelier, Vt. — Not far from the golden dome of the State House here, in the offices of a grass-roots farm advocacy group called Rural Vermont, executive director Andrea Stander is planning a party.

For more than five years now, Ms. Stander has been working with other state advocates and legislators on a law that would require a label on most foods sold in Vermont that contain genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. It has been a tough fight, with both supporters and critics saying the law could upend the American food system. Since passing the Vermont State House in 2014, the GMO labeling law has come up against legal challenges and powerful lobbyists, both in the state and in Washington, D.C., and has raised the ire of big players in the agriculture and biotechnology industries. But unless opponents in the US Congress manage to derail it – something they are still avidly trying to do – Vermont’s labeling law will go into effect July 1.

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How little Vermont, with a population smaller than Memphis, Tenn., has brought change to Big Food nationwide is only part of the story here. Go to the Green Mountain State, with its abundance of farms and more farmers markets per capita than anywhere else in the country (as well as more artisanal cheesemakers), and one gets a glimpse into a much bigger debate. Whether to label GMOs in food touches on the deepest divides in American culture. It raises questions about corporations and control of the nation’s food system, the way people consume resources, scientific knowledge versus indigenous knowledge, and, ultimately, the way Americans live.

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In 1994, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first genetically engineered food for humans – the FLAVR SAVR tomato, made to have a longer shelf life than conventional tomatoes – for sale in US grocery stores. Since then, the production of genetically modified crops has skyrocketed. By 2015, some 94 percent of domestic soybean crop acreage was genetically modified, along with 92 percent of US corn and 94 percent of US cotton, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Almost all US canola oil and sugar beets are genetically engineered.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2016/0625/GMO-labels-The-great-American-food-fight