A federal appeals court on Friday found the Agriculture Department improperly excluded highly refined foods such as corn and soybean oil from labeling regulations for “bioengineered” food products.
In the 52-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld a district court decision that found QR codes and other electronic labeling methods alone were inadequate for the labeling requirements. But diverging from the lower court, the appeals court chose to vacate this part of the rule.
The regulations were issued by the first Trump administration two years after Congress passed a law in 2016 ordering the department to require a uniform disclosure standard for such foods.
The appeals court rejected the decision by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service that a food didn't "contain" biotech ingredients and was therefore exempt from the regulations if the manufacturer said bioengineered genetic material wasn't "detectable" in the product.
“The regulation explicitly recognizes that, if a particular detection technique is not ‘sufficiently sensitive,’ … it will inaccurately fail to detect that the food really does 'contain' modified genetic material,” the ruling says.
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The appeal court declined, however, to force AMS to require disclosures on all highly processed foods.
The lawsuit was filed by Natural Grocers, other retailers and groups supportive of GMO labeling requirements, including the Center for Food Safety. In a president release, the CFS legal director and lead counsel in the case, George Kimbrell, called the decision a “landmark victory for the public’s right to know what they eat.”
"We’ve fought for decades for GMO labeling, as required by more than 60 other countries, and today’s decision is a crucial culmination of those hard-fought efforts,” Kimbrell wrote. "QR codes alone do not provide meaningful access to all Americans, and USDA now will have to remedy that failing and provide accessible labeling."
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