WASHINGTON, July 13, 2016 - A landmark
bill mandating disclosure of genetically engineered food ingredients should be
headed to President Obama’s desk by the end of the week. The House is expected
to give final congressional approval to the Senate-passed legislation on
Thursday.
House Agriculture Chairman Mike
Conaway, R-Texas, and ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minn., told Agri-Pulse in an exclusive interview that they expect the bill to pass easily with
a majority of both Republicans and Democrats. “Now that the Senate
Democrats are for it that will bring a bunch of people,” said Peterson. The
bill passed the Senate 63-30, with the support of 21 Democrats.
More than 1,100 food and agriculture groups and companies signed a
letter urging the House to pass the bill,
and their lobbying has had an impact, said Conaway. “The folks who want this have done a pretty good job of urging members to
support this. The Farm Bureau is out there. All the producers are calling
members,” he said.
No amendments will be allowed, under
terms of a rule for the debate approved Tuesday by the House Rules Committee.
The no-amendment rule was critical because any changes to the bill would send
the legislation back to the Senate, and Congress will be out of session after this
week until September.
Neither Conaway nor Peterson is
particularly enthusiastic about the bill. Both preferred to make GMO disclosure
voluntary, and both lawmakers have misgivings about the discretion it gives the
Agriculture Department.
The bill would give USDA two years to
write a rule that among other things would implement a definition for what
ingredients and breeding techniques are covered under the legislation. USDA’s
general counsel said in a letter to the ranking Democrat of the Senate Agriculture
Committee, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, that the definition could cover highly
refined ingredients such as oils and also would cover a broad range of
bioengineering techniques.
When USDA
has broad discretion in writing regulations, they will vary depending on
“whoever has the ear of the USDA folks who are doing this at the time it gets
done,” said Conaway.
USDA also must set definitions of
“small” and “very small” businesses and set a limit for the amount of a biotech
material in a product that makes it subject to disclosure. In addition, the
department will have to do a study of consumer access to electronic
information. Once the study is done, the department may require, for example,
that grocery stores provide a landline for shoppers to call food makers for
information about biotech ingredients, Conaway said.
Peterson
said he expects Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to start work on the rule
before President Obama leaves office in January,
which would give the next administration a head start. “He’s put a bunch of
time into this already… He’s really into this issue,” said Peterson.
USDA has been providing technical
advice while both the Senate bill and an earlier House version were under
development, and the department’s general counsel provided a letter to Conaway
as well as the one to Stabenow addressing concerns as to how the bill would be
interpreted. A July 8 letter to Conaway
assured him that the legislation would immediately preempt Vermont's GMO
labeling mandate, which took effect July 1, and bar any other states from
imposing requirements that differ from the new federal standards.
Conaway told the Rules Committee that
the House had no choice but to accept the Senate bill as is, given that
Vermont’s mandatory labeling law is now in effect. “The Senate ran the clock
out on purpose,” he said.
#30
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