Health Ministers must not leave us 'Eating in the Dark'
11 December 2011 The Food Regulation Ministerial Council met last week to adopt key recommendations of the National Food Labelling review report, Labelling Logic. More than 5,000 submissions to the Blewett labelling review sought labelling as a general principle of all foods made using new technologies: genetic manipulation (GM), irradiation and nanomaterials.
Gene Ethics called on all Health Ministers to adopt the review's recommendations to label all foods with no track record in the human food supply.
"We are outraged that Health Minister Nicola Roxon has rejected the Labelling Logic proposal: that as a general principle all foods or ingredients that have been processed by new technologies (i.e. which trigger pre-market food safety assessments under Food Standard 1.5) be required to be labelled.
We absolutely reject her tepid claim that: "There is already a process in place to ensure that new technologies are safe before entering the food supply" and ask other Ministers to do the same.
"Evidence for the long-term safety of food ingredients made using new industrial techniques and materials is weak or zero. Everyone agrees that safety and health are top priorities yet the Minister trusts a process that relies on best guesses, requires no monitoring or testing, and denies shoppers' right to know hownew foods were produced, processed and packaged," says Gene Ethics director Bob Phelps.
Evidence for the safety of risky new and untried foods is also scarce because, unlike drugs, once tech-foods are approved there is no register where adverse reactions can be notified or assessed.
Gene Ethics urges support for the Precautionary Principle to be applied to all foods and food ingredients where new technologies cast a shadow over safety. We also ask the Ministers to side with Labelling Logic on the need for a: “distinctive labelling protocol with regard to new food technologies” to respond to: "further technological innovations in food production”.
Gene Ethics rallied at the Ministerial meeting in Treasury Place Melbourne to remind the Ministers of everyone's right to know how our food was made and what's in it.