Unsafe at Any Seed?
October 30, 2003
A new consumer revolution could change the way we label food
Read this excerpt from Grist Magazine:
There's a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign going on in New York City right now regarding smoking in public places. The ads feature slogans like, "If they ban smoking in airports, people will never fly again," and "If they ban smoking in bathrooms, people will never gossip again." I thought of this campaign when I stumbled across a Reuters article on Tuesday describing opposition to a new law requiring that meat, seafood, produce, and peanuts be labeled with their countries of origin. Critics of the law quoted in the article foresaw disasters of nigh-biblical proportions: U.S. exports plunging, thousands of farmers pitched into poverty, $3.9 billion drained from the national economy.
Almost 4 billion bucks to label food products? Well, no, not necessarily; to be precise, the USDA noted that labeling could cost somewhere between $582 million and $3.9 billion the first year the legislation is implemented (assuming Republican lawmakers don't succeed in their effort to block the law in Congress). That is a range so wide you could drive a Hummer through it; at the upper end, it's what the feds are willing to pay�to overhaul the entire nation's notoriously decrepit voting system. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa -- a farm state, mind you) found it "insulting that USDA expects us to believe that [that's] the closest they can estimate."
So why the extravagant figure, the fuzzy math? Scare tactics, it seems: Advocates of food labeling say the numbers are meant to discourage support for the country-of-origin law, which is ardently opposed by the Bush administration and much of the food industry. Next question: Why such strong opposition? After all, one aim of the law is to give U.S. food producers a competitive edge, presumably by evoking patriotic impulses in the meat aisle.
The answer, I suspect, is that the Bush administration and the food industry are trying to forestall something far larger than one probably-not-all-that-burdensome labeling requirement. What they really fear is a snowballing demand for accurate and informative labels for food in general -- and, especially, for genetically modified foods. Allow one labeling bill to slip through, the thinking goes, and the next thing you know, you could have another consumer revolution on your hands...
Continue reading the entire article on the Grist Magazine website:
http://www.gristmagazine.com/thegist/gist103003.asp
