PEW INITIATIVE ON FOOD AND BIOTECHNOLOGY

THURSDAY JUNE 27, 2002

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Great to be here this afternoon.

GREG JAFFE: Hello. My name’s Greg Jaffe.

CRAIG WINTERS: Craig Winters, the Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods.

DAN CHARLES: I’m Dan Charles and it’s my job to make sure everything is much more interesting than what’s been so far.

MIKE RODEMYER: Okay. Good morning. My name is Mike Rodemeyer. I’m the Executive Director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a non-partisan and non-profit project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts through a grant to the University of Richmond. The Initiative was established to help promote dialogue and a better understanding of the issues surrounding agricultural biotechnology and to be an independent and disinterested source of information. It’s our belief that the public and their representatives will be best served by an open and robust discussion of both the potential risks and benefits of biotechnology. The Initiative does not take positions on these issues or related legislation.

To that end, the Initiative is very pleased today to present our Fourth Policy Dialogue. In prior sessions, we’ve dealt with issues relating to the ethical and religious concerns associated with the technology, the trade tensions generated by conflicting regulatory regimes between the United States and the European unions, and some of the environmental benefits and risks of agricultural biotechnology. For those of you who may be interested, the video archive of those dialogues are available on our web site at www.pewagbiotech.org and of course today’s dialogue is also going to be web cast and archived as well.

Today’s topic is on labeling of genetically modified foods, probably one of the more contentious debates in the area of biotechnology. As many of you may know, the US Government does not generally require labeling of genetically modified foods. Some public interest advocates as you’ll hear today argue that consumers have a right to know whether food contains genetically modified ingredients and that the government should mandate labels. Food industry representatives and others respond that labels could mislead consumers into believing that genetically modified foods are less safe than conventional foods and could require extensive efforts to segregate genetically modified crops from non-gm crops, those higher costs being passed on to consumers. And of course there are many questions about whether a label is an effective way to communicate complicated information.

To help us navigate through these issues this morning, we’re very fortunate to have with us someone who knows this territory better than most, Dan Charles. Dan Charles is an author and technology reporter for National Public Radio and he has explored this territory of agricultural biotechnology as a science correspondent for National Public Radio and several science journals and more recently has published the book Lords of the Harvest: Biotechnology, Big Money and the Future of Food, and while this was not selected by Oprah as a selection of her Club, I want to tell you, having read it myself, it’s full of as much drama and human interest as many of her other selections and this book is also won wide praise from such diverse journals, diverse sources as the Harvard Business Review, the Washington Post, and the Foreign Journal. A resident of Washington, DC, Dan brings his own experience of living and working on farms in Pennsylvania and France to this issue and I’m very pleased now to turn over the proceedings for what I believe will be an informative and engaging session to our moderator, Dan Charles.

DAN CHARLES: Thank you, Mike. Nice to be here this afternoon. I welcome you to this room. I also welcome thousands of viewers on the Internet who can tune in to the web cast. I guess my qualification for moderating this discussion is the fact that I really didn’t pay much attention to labeling in the book I wrote. It’s not an issue that I focused on and I didn’t take any position on it, so I can be, I guess, fairly perceived as an impartial, or at least, unknown quantity when it comes to this issue.

In some ways, I’ve always found this issue a paradox. Here we have a situation in which the government, at least the FDA, has taken the position that there is nothing here worth labeling because it doesn’t, apparently, affect the things that people should care about in the labels when it comes to what they put labels on their food. It doesn’t affect, said the FDA, nutrition or safety, and so why bother? Why care? But evidently people do care and I guess this ultimately goes back to the circumstance of at least this first generation of genetically engineered food, wherein products were brought to market and sold to farmers for, for their qualities to the farmer, but they’ve been passed along the food chain as pretty much the same old thing, when, in their food qualities. And a significant number of consumers, for whatever reason, and perhaps we’ll get into a little bit of that this afternoon, the reasons. What are they? For whatever reason, a significant number of consumers apparently do care and do see them as different, also as food, and so arises this desire to know whether these things are in their food or not.

So we’ll explore these questions that Mike mentioned. What are the goals? What would be the goals of a label on food? Is putting a label on food practical? And what would it actually accomplish? What would be the impact on markets, on consumer choice, on government policy, on the public welfare, of a label, of whatever sort? To explore these issues we have a, the best, most qualified panel that I could ever imagine having in one room to talk about this issue. I’ll go from my, proceeding from my right, all the way to the far right.

First is Craig Winters, who has been spearheading the drive to get a label on food that identifies it as containing genetically engineered ingredients, is Executive Director of what’s called the Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Food. He has been active in coalitions along with other groups such as Greenpeace - Genetically Engineered Food Alert that have organized protests and boycotts of food companies and supermarkets that carry genetically engineered food. He is Founding President, the Founding President of Citizens for Health, an advocacy group and has served on the Board of Directors of the National Nutritional Food, Foods Association, Northwest Region. He is the owner and Director of Full Spectrum Health, a consulting firm that provides guidance and advice and research to the organic food industry and other natural products.

We have Greg Jaffe, who is Director of the Project on Biotechnology for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CPSI is well-known in the, in political battles over labeling of food for many years, puts out a newsletter that reaches some 800,000 subscribers called The Nutrition Action Newsletter. He has been a trial attorney for the US Department of Justice’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division. He has also served with the US EPA Air Enforcement Division before joining CSPI to direct the biotechnology project, what, a couple of years ago? About a year and a half ago. He is a lawyer, graduated from Harvard Law School.

Jonathan Frenzen comes to us from nearby, from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. His research activities focus on the impact of social factors on markets, business to business marketing, product development and sales management. He’s been conducting research to look at consumer attitudes toward genetically engineered ingredients in food products, exactly the topic of our discussion this afternoon. And I won’t take away the conclusions immediately except to say that his research has produced some skepticism about the effectiveness about labels as a way to communicate information to the average consumer.

And finally, Austin Sullivan, Jr. is Senior Vice President for corporate relations at General Mills, which is one of the nation’s largest food companies. He is a member of the US Secretary of Agriculture’s Advisor, Advisory Committee on Agricultural Biotechnology. He is a member of the Government Affairs Council of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, a member of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology’s Stakeholder Forum. The Pew Initiative is the organizer of the meeting this afternoon, of course, and I was very pleased to see, he is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Minnesota Public Radio. So, thank you.

The, I don’t want to take more time with introductions. I think we should get right into this issue and start talking about it and the most concrete way, I think, to start talking about it is first a very quick question to you, Craig Winters. The label you’d like to see, what would it say?

CRAIG WINTERS: Well, it would say that these products had been produced by genetically engineering the foods and there is legislation introduced in the US Congress, and in there it specifies what the label would say, but generally it’s on the back of the box type label that would indicate to people that the product either has been genetically engineered or it contains genetically engineered ingredients.

DAN CHARLES: Now just to follow up, the FDA has taken the position that consumers do not have to care, as far as their own health, about the genetically engineered ingredients that are currently in the food supply. Why do you want that label there?

CRAIG WINTERS: Well, yes, in 1992 the US Food and Drug Administration decided that genetically engineered crops are substantially equivalent to non-genetically engineered crops and therefore need no special labeling unless their nutrient profile has been altered or if there is a known allergen. For example, a peanut, if you put that into a genetically engineered product, you’d have to label that. But consumers are skeptical over these products and they have the right to be because if you take a look at the mechanism in place right now for reviewing genetically engineered foods, it’s essentially a scenario where the fox is watching the chicken coop, where the very companies that produce these products are the sole decision makers in whether or not they are problematic. You can just look at the situation with the Starling corn, this corn product that because Aventis, the product was, the company who manufactured said it was perfectly safe, they didn’t even have to notify the FDA they were bringing the product to market, or when the EPA reviewed it, they found it wouldn’t break down necessarily in the human body and so it was the EPA who stopped that product from being sold to humans. And so you have to ask yourself, where is the FDA in this regulatory scheme, and indeed the way it’s set up now, they’re out of the loop. So I think that reason alone is one that consumers, some of us know about, but unfortunately, Dan, the average American out there doesn’t even know they’re eating the product, and when they are reviewed though, and when they’re surveyed, they find, like for example ABC News did a survey about a year ago. 93% of the American public do want these products labeled.

DAN CHARLES: Let’s go directly to Austin Sullivan then. This large percentage of the American public, when asked specifically do you, would you like to see this on the label, they say yes. You’re in the position of saying, we don’t think we want to do that and I’d be interested in knowing why.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: Fine. As Craig has said, and I think it’s important to restate, labeling is already mandatory where a food’s composition has been changed significantly, if there’s a nutritional change, or where an allergen has been introduced. Second, I take Craig’s point about the FDA to mean that he and the people he represents may have some concerns about the adequacy of the review that occurs, which is really a safety question. And our position on safety is that labeling is not a substitute for safety. If a food is unsafe, it should not be marketed. Period. No exceptions. Now of course we all recognize that there is no such thing as zero risk in the food supply, but I think we could have an interesting discussion about the adequacy of the review, but that’s where the discussion ought to focus. If there is any kind of a safety concern, then we ought to tighten up the process to make sure that that concern has been alleviated.

With respect to the public opinion that you cite, Dan, there’s no question that if you ask, if you ask people at the most superficial level, which is gee, would you like to see this on a label, the common, sort of intuitive answer is yes, and the numbers a very large. But if you press just a little bit beneath the surface and you ask people, well, if, if I told you that the FDA requires if there’s any nutritional change in the product, any allergens, you know, would you then feel that you’re comfortable without a label. And there people say in the range of two-thirds to 75%, sure, okay. That’s fine with me. I don’t need a label in that case. If you give them say 7 things, a list of 7 things and say what would you like to see on the label that’s not there right now, and it included information about genetically modified ingredients, 7% identified GMO as something they’d like to see. And most recently, if you, this was a March survey, if you ask people in an open-ended way, what would you like to see on a label? You don’t give them a list, you just say what would you like to see? Only 1% indicate that they want information about GMO, so I think we have to be careful about characterizing what the public wants because it’s clearly a much more nuanced set of answers to that question and they have implications toward what kind of labeling scheme might make sense.

DAN CHARLES: Quick followup. If that number instead of 1% was 30%, would you be doing it already?

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I think that, that I come back to the statement that I made about labeling not being a substitute for safety. Some other research we’ve done, Dan, indicates consumers would perceive a label as a warning. In fact, 50% roughly, and it’s been this way for a couple of years now, if you say to them if there were a product that had GMO ingredient in it, would you purchase that product? 50% say no, I wouldn’t. 10% of that 50% say under no circumstances ever would I purchase it. The remaining 40% would say well I need to know a lot more. So we know that there is a negative connotation that it would be interpreted as a warning. We do not want to present our products to consumers in a way that’s negative and I have to add here that we as food manufacturers don’t get any benefit from this technology. None. What we’re interested in is benefits for consumers. These products currently don’t provide any consumer benefits, so from our standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, there’s nothing we can say that makes this a benefit to you. And so when you combine the warning takeaway that people have, the fact that we can not overcome that by saying well, here is this important health benefit that you would get, we would not want to label the products. If we were forced to do that, as we have been in other jurisdictions, we and indeed has been the reaction of the food industry, has been to go to suppliers and say we do not want these products anymore because we do not want to label our products negatively. So the effect is to drive GMO ingredients out of those marketplaces.

DAN CHARLES: Jonathan Frenzen, you looked at consumers, studied them I imagine in focus groups or surveys or various ways. The scenario that we just heard about the reaction of consumers to this label, is that borne out by your research because I’ve heard other things saying people actually don’t look at the label at all. They pay no attention to it.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: Well, consumers seem to be overwhelmed in supermarkets and there are 40,000 sku’s in a typical supermarket and they’re not paying much attention to what they’re buying or if they are buying, they’re buying out of, largely out of habit. One of the biggest problems is that consumers don’t necessarily understand what the labels are saying and it’s particularly true in this case. If the label were to say that genetically engineered material were contained in the product, our research indicates that most of the American public doesn’t really understand what genetic engineering implies. And this can actually get fairly humorous at times. We’ve conducted focus groups, and the FDA conducted a number of focus groups as well, and in ours in particular, consumers when asked to cite an example of a genetically engineered food, cited tangelos and broccoflower, which are actually rather extreme cases of hybrids as opposed to a genetically engineered food. So my concern would be what are they reacting to? I mean, do they really understand what the label might imply? This leaves the public open to all kinds of interpretations which are not going to be factually based, so whether its kind of a 1% or 30% of the population, our research indicates that most of the American public doesn’t really understand what the label might imply.

DAN CHARLES: So in the case of genetically engineered foods, do you have a best guess as to what the reaction would be? Should there be a label?
JONATHAN FRENZEN: Well without a factual base, the American public is left to be influenced by the most recent media story, the talk on the street, any type of anxiety that may go sweeping through the population and in effect, they’re making a judgment about the existence of the technology in our society and they’re making a judgment based on a limited factual base. That’s a very hard or difficult basis on which to run a democracy. It’s a federal responsibility to understand the decisions that we’re being asked to make and by putting a label on these goods, the American public is being asked to make a decision that they don’t really understand. So my concern would be is that without a factual base, the decisions could be made based on hysterical or emotional concerns and not necessarily based on the science behind the product.

DAN CHARLES: By the way, Greg Jaffe, your note seems to me at least interesting position here because your organization is to a large extent based its reputation and its life in getting stuff on labels, yet if, if I read the material correctly, you don’t necessarily think that labeling is a good solution in the case of genetically engineered food. Are there, first of all, explain to me why you would not necessarily feel like labeling is a good thing in this case, and are there better alternatives to get to some, to accomplish the goal of consumer knowledge that give information to people who actually want it?

GREG JAFFE: We all, we as in the other groups here, have done surveys and done focus groups on this issue and it is a difficult issue and I think that’s why our position is sort of a nuance position because of that. Consumers definitely want to know information about this and from that perspective we’d like to get it to them. Labeling is one way to get it to them. It may not be the only way to get it them. It may or may not be the best way to get it to them. When we’ve done our surveys, we find that consumers don’t just want labeling about genetically engineered food, they want labeling about pesticides, they want labeling about all kinds of agricultural practices. So I think that in general, Americans don’t know a lot about how their food is, gets to the supermarket. They don’t know a lot about the different technologies and the procedures that are used, and when asked, they want information about all of those. So I think that the baseline is that people want information and the question is how to get that information to them. I agree also that there’s not a lot of knowledge in the American consumer population about genetically engineered foods, what they are and what they mean, and so when you put information on a label and people don’t have the context to understand that information, you may get people making decisions not based, not very factually based. And so I think that any labeling that would go on needs to have a lot of education around it because right now people don’t, would not understand that. We’ve done focus groups and come up with similar results when asked what a bio-engineered food or genetically engineered food is, people say something like seedless watermelon. That’s a good guess for a lot of people. It’s an intelligent response because they know that watermelons normally have seeds, so if they are seedless, somebody had to do something. Man had to intervene there to make a seedless watermelon, yet it’s not through genetic engineering that they did that. So I think that there isn’t a lot of information that people know about this. So then when you look towards labeling from our perspective, I think that mandatory labeling might be a way to get that information to them, but you’ve got to get that information out there in a specific way and with a specific content and so from our perspective, we’d want to see neutral, value-free information that’s accurate, that provides information to the consumer who wants to know it, but isn’t a warning sign, isn’t a warning that this food is somehow less safe than other food or this food is superior.

DAN CHARLES: So how do you do that?

GREG JAFFE: I’m not completely sure. I think maybe one way to do that is to put, you know you might be able to put it in the ingredient list, where you had a genetically engineered, corn flakes or something that had genetically engineered corn in it, you could put corn in parenthesis genetically engineered in the ingredient list. It would not be out there as a warning sign. Some of the labels today have big sunbursts, you know, out in the front that say no GMO’s, out there to scare you or worse some of them say no GMO’s, peer food, or 100% natural, somehow suggesting that because this food doesn’t have genetically engineered, modified organisms, it’s somehow safer or different than other foods and that’s just not the case with the current crops. They are as safe as the conventionally bred corn and so maybe you’d be able to do it in an ingredient list, maybe you could have a symbol, like a Kosher symbol, or something like that, but again, we need education around those so that, so that the consumer could understand what those mean to be able to use that information if they want to use it. I think the other thing is that our surveys have at least shown that consumers, although they want this information, they don’t want to pay a lot for this information. And it’s something they’d like, but when asked say how much more they’d be willing to pay for this or how does it compare to other things they want labeled and things like that, there’s a small, but significant percentage of the population who care about this a lot, or a large percentage of the population would like to see it, but when asked about how much they’d pay for it, they really won’t pay for it. And so I think you’ve got a conflicted system that also isn’t going to increase costs to the consumer. So I think you’ve got to weight a lot of things in order to come up with a labeling scheme.

DAN CHARLES: You know there’s a question, I want to get back to you, Craig, because there’s something I’ve wondered about. Let’s say there was a more rigorous regulatory system, more along the lines of what you’ve asked for. Let’s say that you personally were convinced that there was no safety issue at all, would you still want them labeled?

CRAIG WINTERS: Well I think we’re in a nation where we want a lot of rights and labeling is something that a lot of people can use for a secondary reason and that’s not just to necessarily know whether the product’s genetically engineered, but they want to support companies that they feel good about. And for example, right now we’ve got a situation where the genetically engineered corn is blowing into organic cornfields, polluting organic corn and because of that, some of the people who support organics would like to not purchase products that are from a company that’s doing that right now and Monsanto would be the one that comes up at the top of the list [unintelligible] because right now they’re the major genetically engineered company. A lot of tough consumers don’t like that. So we also vote with our dollars and so I think that reason to, but there’s been a statement that’s been made here I think that, about these products being safe and we really don’t know whether they’re safe. That’s something that’s an assumption that the biotech industries want you to believe that oh, we know these products are safe and putting this label serves no purpose and the situation is there’s no peer review studies out there. If you go do a med-line search and look and see, well, they say that these are the most researched products in human history, and you go and you try to look that up, you find that there’s no peer reviewed studies out there. You find situations where all these products have antibiotic marker genes, which the British Medical Association has said because of that they should be banned. You have a situation where Monsanto comes out a couple of years ago and says we found some unexpected gene fragments in our soybeans, so when they do that, you have to ask yourself, well what other unexpected things are in these products that we don’t know about. So the assumption that they’re safe, I think is not really accurate.

DAN CHARLES: The, I don’t mean to pick on you, but there’s another aspect of this. Various people have mentioned that the American consumer would like lots of things labeled. I’m not sure what all is on that list. Greg Jaffe could, you know, perhaps mention some, you know. Were they grown with X or Y pesticide? I could imagine in years past had this come from South Africa, let’s say, I mean that would be an analogy to I don’t want to support Monsanto. I don’t want to buy a product from South Africa. But there are lots of things that happen in the food supply. Seedless watermelon. Interesting genetic manipulation going on with seedless watermelon. There are herbicide-resistant soybeans that were produced not through genetic engineering, but through what they call mutagenesis. Why focus for the labeling campaign on genetic engineering as such?

CRAIG WINTERS: Well, granted, through normal hybridization you create new products and those products don’t go through an extensive review process either, but there’s something just common sense would strike you that if you take an orange and a tangerine and you make a tangelo or something that God is allowing that, that genetic transmutation to take place, it’s not where you’re taking a gene from a product and forcing it into an entirely different product. So that’s just from a point of view from what seems natural strikes people and this is really one of the big problems is when they do this kind of genetic manipulation, you’re creating what they call novel proteins and these novel proteins, we don’t know what the effect is on humans that are eating them. For example, most of the people listening to this broadcast right now can eat peanuts without any problem, but there’s a certain percentage of the public that if they eat that peanut they’ll get sick or even die. So when they start creating these new genetically engineered products and they’re not testing them like they would a normal new product like a food additive or a drug where you do double-blind peer review studies, then we’re basically making guinea pigs of the American public. And I think that a lot of us don’t want to be guinea pigs, we want the option to be able to say I prefer not to participate in this little feeding experiment you go on here, you’ve got going on here.

DAN CHARLES: Austin Sullivan, feeding experiment going on here? I mean, how do you respond to that?

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: Well, I, I repeat myself. If something is unsafe, it should not be sold. Period. No exceptions. The question then is how do we make that judgment and I’m not a scientist, so I can’t speak with personal authority about that, but I have, thanks to the Pew Charitable Trust, participated in extensive discussions and presentations on the regulatory process and I can tell you that while there are clearly imperfections in the system, the amount of research that is produced and the amount of research that is reviewed by the scientists at, at the FDA is voluminous and unlike anything that occurs for any other food product. And so I think it is a generally accepted view, and I respect Craig’s views to the contrary, but I think the general view is that the science has been very good and that we really don’t know of any, of any safety issues with products currently on the market. And I think then the question is well, as these products become more complex, do we feel we have the right system in place? And I think that scenario that’s ripe for discussion. I think, as in all things, as in your own life, as in our business, we can make improvements, but the bottom line is that where there is any question about safety, the product does not get to the market, nor should it.

DAN CHARLES: What about this idea that Greg Jaffe raised about just in the ingredient list mention, I don’t know, put the words genetically engineered in front of cornstarch.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I guess I would have a different view of where to start in thinking about providing information. I think it’s quite clear that there are, there is a group of people, consumers, that has an intense interest in this subject. I happen to think it’s a pretty small group, and others might disagree, but the research I’ve seen at least is that it’s relatively small, yet it cares a lot. I don’t know exactly what that number is, but let’s just take that 10% that said they would never buy a genetically modified product, labeled genetically modified, and so the way my mind would run on this is okay, if there is a group of consumers that really wants this information, then why don’t we come up with a system that gives that information to those consumers that’s market driven. In effect, a manufacturer, and there are some today who do this, a manufacturer would produce products that did not use genetically engineered ingredients and would convey that information to consumers, that way the cost of segregated crops, of segregating commodities as they move through the grain system or the other systems that we have in this country, the cost of doing the testing to confirm the accuracy of the label would be borne by people who feel they have a market for these products, and that market is people who want to assure themselves that what they’re eating does not contain genetically modified ingredients and that’s sometimes known as voluntary labeling and I believe, although we are all Waiting for Godot on this, that the FDA is going to come out with a set of rules that would make that labeling possible and as I have mentioned, some have not waited for the FDA to do that. They’ve gone out and done it already. And then of course, there is the, you know, the whole organic movement, and other the rules for organic products, they are not supposed to use genetically modified ingredients, and so that’s another alternative for consumers.

DAN CHARLES: I should mention, I think it’s fair to say, your company participates in both streams.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: Yes, it does. Yes, it does.

DAN CHARLES: The idea, and I think this is a question from Jonathan Frenzen and Greg Jaffe both, the idea that the market will just solve this, that consumer wishes do get met through the mechanism of the marketplace, by companies looking for that segment of demand and satisfying it. Is it possible that it will simply solve itself in that fashion, this desire for knowing whether food contains genetically engineered ingredients or not, and so we don’t have to worry about regulation?

GREG JAFFE: I don’t think it will. I mean, I don’t think that voluntary labeling will work in this context, partially because of the political climate and because it’s often said, nobody’s going to label that their product contains genetically engineered ingredients under the current climate. So what you have in a voluntary system are two things. One is all you have are absence claims. All you have are claims that something doesn’t contain genetically engineered ingredients. There may be people out there who want to purchase, who want to support reduction in pesticide use that comes from using a genetically engineered product and so they want to support that. Or they think these are safe and they want, they don’t care about that, but they want to see it on there because they just want the right to know. They want the ability to choose what they want, they want to know what they’re putting in their bodies, whether, they may not care about it, that it’s genetically engineered, but they want to know. Just the idea that something’s hidden from them bothers them. So I think that the problem with voluntary labeling is you’re going to get some absence claims only and it’s going to be a few of them.

The second problem with voluntary labeling is, and this, we’ve looked at the voluntary labels that are out there, is most of them are misleading. They’re not neutral. They’re not value-free. They tend to be scare tactics. They tend to be big sunbursts or things that somehow suggest that this food is safer than genetically engineered equivalent product and so I think that the problem with voluntary labeling is you end up misleading a lot of consumers and companies may in fact try to extract a premium for those products from those consumers when that’s not justified if they are as safe as they need to be. So I think that the voluntary labeling in this situation isn’t going to provide many consumers information.

Now I’d like to pick up on something Austin said and I think our survey showed that there are a significant number of people, it’s not a majority of people who are very interested in this information, and I’d like to work on ways to try to get that information to them. If we can’t get a mandatory labeling system in place, maybe there’s a way that through consumer, through web sites or through 800 numbers or something, companies can provide that information, so that a person, it’s not as easy as getting the information on a label because it’s not right there in the supermarket, but somebody who wants to find out whether Kellogg’s cornflakes or whether Wheaties or whatever the cereal they’re eating has or doesn’t have genetic engineered ingredients could call up and find that out. There may be some way to get information to consumers who want it and they want it know whether products contain or don’t contain, in a way that they’ll, consumers who feel strongly about this can get that information to make their informed decision, but maybe some other consumers who don’t care as much about it won’t take that extra step. I understand that.

DAN CHARLES: Will companies, will companies readily provide that information if asked, at this point? Does anybody know that?

GREG JAFFE: I mean, I’ve done a small survey myself, not a statistically significant survey, but I called about a dozen different companies and you know, asked about specific products and asked whether those products contained genetic engineered ingredients and the answers were across the map. Some of them did provide that information. They said that X product did contain, the corn oil came from genetically engineered corn, or something along that line. Some of them said they didn’t and they explained to me why they could verify that. Some of them just provided generic statements that said some of our products may contain it because we buy corn and some of our products contain corn, and corn is genetically engineered in the United States. That in my mind was not a satisfactory answer. It didn’t give a product-specific answer. So I think it varies.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: I think we need to be clearer too about whether or not it’s a final product that the consumer is ingesting, that it’s a genetically engineered product and whether or not genetic engineering is used as part of a process. So in some cases enzymes are developed using genetically engineered bacteria that are used to coagulate milk and say produce cheese. Now does that mean that the cheese produced with the enzyme deep within the industrial process in a way that really doesn’t affect the final product at all, its safety, its taste, its color. Is that a genetically engineered product and do consumers have the obligation or the need to know that at some point in the industrial stream, a genetically engineered product has touched the industrial process?

DAN CHARLES: Coming back to you, Austin Sullivan. The people have raised the scenario if labels were required, similar to what has happened and will happen in a stricter way in Europe, food manufacturers would go out and find non-genetically engineered ingredients because they don’t want to label their foods as containing genetically engineered ingredients. Conceivably this could have the effect of sending a very clear single to farmers that if you plant these crops, you endanger at least the price that you could get by selling them, seems like a rational response. You’ve said you get no benefit from these products, the consumer gets no benefit from these products. These are frankly a pain in the neck for you, they force you to take time sitting on panels, answering questions like this. Why don’t you and your fellow food industry executives just shut this down and the world would be a simpler place for it?

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: Well that, that’s a question we ask ourselves from time to time. And we have felt that the technology offers promise downstream that it makes it a candle worth lighting and sticking with as long as there aren’t any safety issues associated with it. The experience of the food industry in jurisdictions like Europe and now Australia, New Zealand and Japan has been exactly that. People have sourced non-GMO products and obviously if we did that in the United States, that would send a powerful message to US agriculture and I think people would just avoid the seeds. And you know, and we would, I think, retire the development of the technology. The long term solution to the labeling issue I think is in fact for this technology to deliver on some of its promise to deliver on producing meaningful consumer benefits. There’s stuff in the pipeline that could confer significant health benefits for people who are either people in general or just people who are managing certain kinds of conditions and diseases. There may be ways of the technology improving performance of products, making them easier to handle in a manufacturing situation, so there are a lot of ways in which potentially this technology could benefit good manufacturers that just haven’t arrived yet. They have arrived for farmers and farmers are in some sense our partners and recent study came out talking about yields and the fact that the technology does in fact improve yields rather significantly and you know, more so in some crops than in others. It does reduce the use of pesticides, again more so in some crops than in others and these are not insignificant issues.

Norman Borlag was quoted recently, he’s the Nobel Prize winning agronomist who developed, you know, higher yield hybrids in Mexico, but he said if we were still getting the yields out of agriculture today that we were getting in 1950, half of the 16 million square miles of global forest would have been cut down already for production agriculture and the other half would fast be on its way. So there are benefits, Dan, that I think make it worth hanging in there as long as we can. Quite candidly, we have said to the biotech industry that we are in a perilous situation until consumer benefits arrive. I think once consumer benefits arrive then people can evaluate the risk versus the benefit, but right now, there is no direct tangible benefit to the consumer and there is, you know, the occasional media story or this group or that group that raises concerns and fears, and so a perfectly rational response would be, you know, why bother. Why take any risk? So I think what, what would happen now if, if there were mandatory labeling is just the scenario that you described. We would tell our suppliers don’t give us this stuff anymore. It might take a year or two to work out of it, but that’s where we’d go.

DAN CHARLES: Are you happy with that, Craig?

CRAIG WINTERS: If they eliminated it from the food, well, I think, yes. There’s four different types of genetically engineered crops. There’s the herbicide-resistant crops, like the soybeans, there’s the ones with the built-in pesticide like the corn, and those are the two types that are in the market right now. The ones that Austin was just talking about are the nutrient-fortified crops which maybe they’ll come out with a tomato with a high lycopene content which could help prevent male prostate cancer and things like that. Well those products they’ll want to label because they’re going to be charging premium prices on them and so it’s right now a little bit of a bait and switch going on where they’re promoting the benefits of golden rice and nutrient-fortified crops, but they’re selling us herbicide-resistant soybeans and genetically engineered corn and again, the corn is what we really have a huge problem with because it’s contaminating organic corn fields and then the fourth category would be these pharmaceutical crops that they’re developing. We have a huge problem with those, too, because the pollen again can blow into the normal food supply. So there’s a lot of environmental and health dangers from these products, but I think yes, we’d love to see General Mills eliminate these out of their normal product line right now, and keeping in mind that as what Austin said, everywhere around the world where labeling does come into effect, it does therefore have an effect on the marketplace where the companies start sourcing out non-genetically engineered crops, but there’s a second reason that I think we really need to remember about why these companies aren’t, and not so much General Mills or anybody, but I’m talking more about the manufacturers not wanting labeling, but also by not labeling it gives them liability protection right now. If they do find that some of these crops which again are not safety tested, there’s no purity studies out there. If you go look at med-line, go do a med-line search, and try to find the peer review studies out there, you’ll find they don’t exist. There’s a lot of opinions and articles, but not peer review scientific studies that if these products, they do find one comes to market that does have problems, that if they’re not labeled then it really dramatically reduces their liability. If they were labeled, then there could be massive lawsuits that you are feeding me a crop that causes an allergen for example. There’s soybeans out there that have a petunia in there and so, let’s say, a certain percentage in the American public is allergic to petunias, but we don’t know that, how many people eat petunias as part of their normal diet. Again, let’s take it back to that peanut analogy, some people if they eat a peanut will get sick or even die. Maybe some people if they ate a petunia will have that same reaction. This is in the food chain and we don’t know again, what percentage of the public might be having negative reactions to these novel proteins, so by not labeling they dramatically reduce their liability.

DAN CHARLES: Just for clarity sake, this petunia gene you’re talking about, what exactly are you talking about?

CRAIG WINTERS: A soybean that’s been genetically engineered into, they use different proteins, and there’s been a soybean that has a petunia protein in there. They’re also using other flowers.

DAN CHARLES: I’m not aware of this on the market.

CRAIG WINTERS: Well it’s been, it’s in the studies that they, the point is, even the union of concerned scientists has come out and said what is the real issue? The issue is novel proteins. We don’t know when they genetically engineer these crops and they create new proteins, never tested…

DAN CHARLES: Just to make a point, I think the study you’re referring to, early on in creating roundup ready soybeans, they used a variance of, they used genes from petunias and over-expressed them, but that’s, as far as I know, not what’s in the food supply now.

CRAIG WINTERS: Okay, but that’s an example though where something like that could happen when they put a protein in there, and put it out in the marketplace without doing human studies, what reaction might a small percentage, again if they do label these products then, I know the idea is that consumers are going to have a negative reaction to labeling, but if you stop and think about it, if you proudly put on your label that these products are genetically engineered, then it says that we are confident that these products are safe. And if indeed consumers look deeper into and they say well, gosh, you know, that’s true. They have done the peer review studies. They have done adequate safety testing. I’m happy to eat a genetically engineered crop because I do believe it is safer, but right now, that’s not the scenario that’s out there right now. It’s like very little research is being done and the labeling would have that effect because they aren’t testing these products to the degree they need to.

DAN CHARLES: Okay, I’ve got several people jumping in. Let’s start with…

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I’d like to comment again that me personally and my company would be very conservative on what would, what should be allowed even in experiments if it has the potential to get into the food supply in any kind of untested, unregulated way. The survey work that we’ve done indicates that there is not the level of confidence in the regulatory scheme for these classes of products that we would like to see and I think that some of that is perception that there is not adequate transparency in the process today and, and the agencies have not done, perhaps as good a job as they might at explaining what they’re doing in their processes and letting the public look at that in a very transparent way. In other regards, there may be a need to improve those processes and I would be in favor of all of that. I do not want products on the market that haven’t been tested six ways from Sunday and fully approved by competent scientists working in the public interest, so let me clear about that. I don’t think a label is a substitute for that.

GREG JAFFE: Yes. I want to make a couple points. One is I think it would be a mistake if all of a sudden we got rid of all the genetically engineered crops out there and avoided putting them in foods because people don’t understand these and may be afraid to eat them. I think there are benefits to the environment from the current crops that are out there and I think there are benefits to farmers out there and as an organization that cares about the environment and cares about farmers, I guess we’d like to see those benefits continue. We’ve also looked at the studies, and I believe there are lots of studies out there that are in journals and there’s a lot of evidence that’s been provided to the agencies for the current crops and our assessment is that those are safe to eat and we’re comfortable telling our 800,000 subscribers that they shouldn’t worry about eating foods that genetically engineered ingredients. So I guess I differ with Craig on that point.

DAN CHARLES: What about the antibiotic marker genes? Do you feel comfortable that people are eating these antibiotics?

GREG JAFFE: I’m very comfortable that there is a huge amount of evidence out there and all of the scientific studies that have stated that there is virtually no chance of that antibiotic resistant marker gene transferring in the human gutter, into a microbear and causing any problems. So that one actually I think is probably the one I’m most confident about in terms of a safety risk, a food safety risk or a human safety risk. That doesn’t mean that we can’t get rid of those antibiotic resistant markers. I think the companies should get rid of those.

DAN CHARLES: Even the AMA has even recommended…

GREG JAFFE: They’ve all recommended getting rid of them, but they’ve all said that there’s no real risk there. But I do agree that the current system of reviewing these crops for food safety is inadequate out there and I don’t think that should be a substitute. We shouldn’t allow, I agree with Austin, that we shouldn’t allow crops on the market that aren’t safe. We shouldn’t use labeling as a surrogate for safety. Our organization is pushing for a mandatory, pre-market approval process by FDA. I think it is a crime out there that FDA only has a voluntary system, where these companies voluntarily come in, they don’t have to come in, and the FDA doesn’t say it’s safe. And I think that it would give General Mills and all the other companies also, a little bit of breathing room if they could also say when somebody called and asked about this, FDA has looked at this and approved it and said that it’s safe, as opposed to relying on Monsanto saying it’s safe. Although I think that the current crops out there are safe to eat, I am very uncomfortable with the current regulatory system and I think that if we had a mandatory, pre-market approval process at FDA, that would go a long way to alleviating fears that consumers have about these foods and it might decrease the call for labeling.

DAN CHARLES: The, I have to ask, there seems to be this assumption that the reaction that happened in Europe would happen here. And I’d like to question it just a little bit. Is it possible for instance, Jonathan Frenzen, is it possible that in fact you’d put this label on the food and basically put this label on lots and lots of food on the grocery shelves now, and absolutely nothing would happen? People would keep buying what they’ve always bought.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: It would be, I would think it would be something like a tinder dry forest, waiting to burn to borrow a recent analogy. It is possible. I think the moment that there was a problem such as Starling that might happen, that public opinion could be rapidly swayed against these types of crops. One thing I might point out is that somebody just finished some focus groups in France and 80% of the French are opposed to using genetically engineered crops. But as they were conducting the focus groups, they left the product in front of the 10 or 11 subjects that were participating and in the course of 5 or 10 minutes of looking at the product, no one noticed that an EU genetically modified organism label was actually on the product, and nobody discussed the matter until it was prompted by the focus group facilitator. So there is some possibility that consumers could simply overlook these kinds of details. They overlook plenty of details, for instance labels about fat content for many, many years and it certainly hasn’t stopped the American population from growing increasingly obese.
DAN CHARLES: Yes, because, before we go to questions, I’ll just ask one more somewhat provocative one because it does seem, and I wonder if there’s any parallel to anything else that you can think of right off hand, in the food supply, this, this problematic situation in which the industry, and apparently this is borne out by studies, has things in the food supply that they evidently do not want to state because they’re afraid that people wouldn’t buy them, for whatever reason. And I’m thinking, is there anything else that you can think of currently in the food supply, that if stated explicitly there was a reasonable chance that consumers would run the other way?

JONATHAN FRENZEN: … are subject to irradiation and I don’t believe that information appears on the package. And attempts to use irradiation techniques to take bacteria out of hamburger, for example, the American public is terrified of radiation in meat and would tend to reject the product.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I think irradiation is an excellent example because there you actually do have a huge consumer benefit. I mean, you all recall the E. coli scares. Irradiation eliminates the potential for E. coli and yet nobody will touch it. It’s like the third rail. You don’t want that symbol on your package. Another thing I think, Dan, that might fall into that category would be pesticide residues that, you know, there are certain products that come through the system with trace residues of pesticides and I think that would be an alarming message to consumers. There’s a lot of things in food that if people fully understood might alarm them. It’s not a perfect world, but that one certainly comes to mind.

DAN CHARLES: On that comforting note, let’s open it up for questions. A couple of them immediately and I’ll intersperse some that have come from the Internet. I think for the purposes of the web cast and hearing the question, it might be good if you’d go over to this microphone over here. And so start with you here in the front, and then we’ll go to the gentleman in the back.

Q: You mentioned the, you mentioned the FDA process for greater transparency. I know that there was considerable talk of the rulemaking for both I guess web-based information from companies, making that data available, as well as moving toward a mandatory process. Where is that at in the pipeline right now, in the rulemaking pipeline?
DAN CHARLES: Could I ask I forgot to ask the questioners to identify yourself?

Q: Oh, I’m sorry. Martin Ross from Illinois Farmweek.

DAN CHARLES: I’d like Greg to handle that. He’s my expert.

GREG JAFFE: From the inside the beltway perspective, FDA, you’re right, FDA proposed in the last days of the Clinton administration, proposed a pre-notification, mandatory pre-notification for biotech foods. Before they could be marketed, you’d have to provide a notification to FDA about that food. That rule has not been finalized yet. FDA came out with their priorities for fiscal year 2002 which were in and that is not a priority to be completed in 2002. It is supposed to be a priority to be completed in 2003. So the agency has said that they will hopefully complete that rule in 2003. We now have the Bush administration and they have a different general counsel, and there is some question about what that rule will look like when it comes out and if it comes out.

Q: Part B of that question. Martin Ross from Illinois Farmweek. Is there Congressional pressure to get that process underway, to get those rules approved, etc?

GREG JAFFE: I’m not aware of any congressmen or senators who have written to HSS and asked them to finalize that rule. I know that there are bills that have been introduced by Congressman Kucinich about mandatory approval that were introduced last Congress and reintroduced this Congress. Senator Durbin last Congress introduced a bill on mandatory FDA approval and is going to be introducing I believe a bill again in this Congress about it. So there is some Congressional interest in this, but I’m not aware of any specific Congressional inquiries into that rule.

DAN CHARLES: Any further response? Now let’s get the question from the back.

Q: While it’s true that the benefits of the crop…

DAN CHARLES: Identify yourself.

Q: My name is Richard Mattalis. I’m a consultant in biotechnology. While it’s true that the benefits of the genetically engineered crops that are so far on the market are mainly to the farmer, nonetheless there are benefits to the consumer and I’m surprised you didn’t mention one of them, that the insect-resistant corn has significantly lower levels of mycotoxin, which is an all-natural toxin produced by fungi on the corn and that since most of this corn is fed to cattle, the milk from the cows also has lower levels of mycotoxin. So you know the government has standards for mycotoxin levels in milk and certainly the insect-resistant corn is better in that respect, which is a consumer benefit, probably an unintended one, but a benefit nonetheless.

DAN CHARLES: Thank you. I didn’t mention it because I did not know that, so I’ve been educated. Thank you.

Q: It’s been published in peer-reviewed journals.

DAN CHARLES: Tells you what I read. Let’s go to a question that comes from Benjamin at the Rutgers, Rutgers Food Policy Institute. Acceptance of GMO foods depends on how much information the consumer has on a product, just like any other product. What makes you say that information through labeling does not provide this benefit to the consumer? And I think I’ll direct that to Jonathan Frenzen.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: Well the amount of information that has to be provided by the label to help someone have knowledge and understanding of the decision they’re making is the problem. The labels are restricted to fairly small space and a fairly small amount of text. So indeed the amount of information that is provided does sway someone’s decision, and this is an issue when you’re conducting research. You have to make sure that you provide both sides of the argument in order to get a fair read on how people are formulating their attitudes. I don’t think a label is going to provide sufficient space to be able to provide the information that customers need.

DAN CHARLES: Are there any specific examples you can point to of labels having pernicious effects in terms of consumer reaction?

JONATHAN FRENZEN: Indeed, Austin’s just prompting here, irradiation is an example, but that label has been rarely used.

DAN CHARLES: But where it was used, what was the reaction? Is this fear of the label, and so it never even gets into the marketplace?

JONATHAN FRENZEN: We have 30 years of cheap science fiction movies creating giant crickets caused by radiation that has driven a tremendous amount of fear into the American population regarding anything to do with radiation.

DAN CHARLES: Okay. Any other responses to that? Okay, so another question from the web viewers. This has to do with organic producers and the labels that have been used in that portion of the industry. Organic producers want to sell GMO free products. How do you define GMO-free? Why is the old standard of 99% purity indeed not acceptable in this case? I didn’t know there was a 99% standard. Perhaps someone will enlighten me.

CRAIG WINTERS: Well there’s not such, 99%, I mean they must be referring to possibly the European regulations over there where 1% is the trigger for labeling a genetically engineered product but we as an organization, the Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods, don’t think GE-free should be used because the word free in the US regulatory scheme when you’re looking at, let’s say, alcohol. If you walk into a store and it says alcohol-free beer versus non-alcoholic beer. That alcohol-free beer is 0% alcohol. The non-alcoholic beer can be up ½% alcohol. We would like to see a label that uses the word non rather than free because we think then you could tack on a percentage to that and determine whether it is non-genetically engineered down to whatever degree is appropriate. We’d like to see as low as possible, maybe 1/10 of 1% but if the pollution factor out there which is taking place, again particularly in corn because corn pollen can blow for miles and it is contaminating organic corn fields, we might have to raise that up to a higher level.

GREG JAFFE: I might just add, the way the organic standards are written now, you can label something organic and if it qualifies as organic, one of the things it has to be, it didn’t come from genetically engineered seeds. So if you see a food out there that has the label organic on it, by definition it doesn’t, it didn’t come from genetically engineered seeds or any of the ingredients that are in that food. What I also want to say though is the organic, when you label something organic, it’s because of the way you produce it. It’s a method of production so that doesn’t mean if you label it organic that you didn’t use GM seeds, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain any genetically engineered content in any way because of pollen or because there might be some contamination in that seed, it’s based on the procedure. So you don’t have to test it. The farmer needs to testify that in fact he grew it without using pesticides and followed the rules that allow something to be labeled organic.

CRAIG WINTERS: Right. It’s a process, rather than an end product. There might be a pesticide drift that comes in. People think there’s absolutely no pesticides in organics. Well there might be a neighboring farm that blew in there and is out of the control of the organic farmer so it might be, granted low levels though.

DAN CHARLES: Would a similar thing be possible with this pollen contamination you’re talking about?

CRAIG WINTERS: Right. Exactly. That’s the issue and we feel that it’s, the organic industry is under direct assault right now is the problem with genetically engineered corn because not only is the pollen blowing in the organic corn fields, also the use of [unintelligible] BT, this is something the organic farmer uses to spray on his crop if he has an insect infestation, and the over use of BT by the biotech industry is going to undermine that defense that the organic industry has right now. So the organic industry is under double assault.

DAN CHARLES: Just to, you know, ensure some clarity here. If I understood Greg correctly, the organic certification refers to it can’t be produced from genetically engineered seed. So pollen blowing in from outside would not affect organic certification. It wouldn’t, that would not prevent a farmer from selling the harvest.

GREG JAFFE: That is correct. As long as, again an organic farmer has followed the procedures to label something as organic, you could test it and it could contain 0% genetically engineered content. It could contain 1%. It could contain more than 1% and still could be labeled organic. But if somebody out there want to be fairly comfortable that they’re eating a product, they want to eat a product that is you know, generally doesn’t have genetically engineered content in it, if they pick an organic thing, if it has any impurities, it’s going to be very small.

CRAIG WINTERS: The problem again is that our American organic standard could be considered inferior to the rest of the world’s if we allow this to continue over the years and the organic corn, in particular, because soybeans are self-pollinating, but corn blows its pollen great distances. It’s really the one that’s under the most assault right now.

DAN CHARLES: So export markets…

CRAIG WINTERS: …could be affected by an American organic being considered an inferior product to another country’s organic.

DAN CHARLES: Right. Got it. Don’t want to cut the room out of the discussion. Any questions before I continue with the web cast questions? The room is silent. I’ll continue. That question by the way, that I just read, I didn’t identify it, if I understand this correctly, was from Helen Aquino at the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers. Another question from Rutgers. I didn’t realize that. Okay, from Kim Booker at Columbia University. Many of the arguments put forth against labeling, it’s too expensive, consumers won’t know what to do with the information are very similar to those used against the NLEA.

CRAIG WINTERS: That’s the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, when they put the nutrition boxes on.

DAN CHARLES: Thank you. And the nutrition facts panel, which have been considered by fans and nay Sayers alike to be one of the more successful policy tools. Is it possible that labeling DMO’s could someday prove very useful if we quit arguing about it? We should do it, if we quit arguing about if we should do it and instead focus on how to get it down fairly. There’s a question.

CRAIG WINTERS: I’d love to take that one. I mean, yes, this is it. I mean if you look at last week’s Newsweek had a full-page ad about genetically engineered soybeans and how wonderful they are and everything. So on one hand they’re saying these are great products. You should be totally comfortable and they mention the USDA and the FDA and the EPA and all this in the there, but then, when it actually comes to the products on the shelf, they’re saying, no, we don’t want to label them. So, again, consumers won’t necessarily perceive this as negative if they back it up with the studies and the information to show that these are safe and you shouldn’t be concerned, but unfortunately right now, that’s not the case.

DAN CHARLES: After that softball question, here Craig. Mr. Winters, why is eating GM food any more of an experiment than taking a dietary supplement, a group of chemicals you have championed? Shouldn’t we have a dietary supplement label saying, “This material has never been fully tested for human safety, cancer or effects on children.”?

CRAIG WINTERS: Well, interesting question, Dan. It depends. When you’re talking about dietary supplements, you’re not just talking about vitamins and minerals, you’re talking usually about herbs and amino acids and such, and when it comes to the vitamins and minerals, we know there’s specific molecular structures there. And we know there’s requirements by the human body, which a lot of people aren’t getting adequate levels of. Now when it gets into something like herbs, then you’ve got a lot more controversy there, and indeed, people should be concerned about herbs and they should ask those questions. A lot of it has to boil down, let the consumer beware, but right now, under the current Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1990, if there is a health problem out there the Food and Drug Administration has more than adequate powers to go and move in on that product. And we have to remind ourselves that herbs have been around for about 5,000 years. They’ve got intensive research been done in Germany. They’ve got monographs on a lot of these herbs. So even though the United States regulatory agency hasn’t jumped in there and done the scientific analysis, there is other analysis from around the world and, and so, show us the negative reactions and I think the market will respond.

DAN CHARLES: Austin, do you sell dietary supplements?

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: Yes. No. It’s a very profitable business, so probably we should. I don’t want to pile on Craig, but you know, that is an area in fact where the FDA has expressed concern. They do have concerns about some of the safety issues with these supplements and they especially have concerns about the claims that are being made, the health claims, which the act that you cite prevents them from effectively regulating, in their view. In their view. In their view, it does. And yet we, when we make a health claim, you know, we have to support that with studies that have gone on for years. It has to be a consensus of science. So it is interesting how one sees things depending on what shoe one is wearing in this debate about food.

CRAIG WINTERS: There’s no allowance of health claims under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. You can structure function claims, but health claims are not allowed.

DAN CHARLES: We are vigorously pursuing this detour here. Greg.

GREG JAFFE: I just might add, I mean, our organization is also very involved in dietary supplements and our view is that they aren’t sufficiently regulated by FDA and there are a lot of misleading claims out there and there is some big concerns. So I would agree with the question that was asked, the questioner.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: The thing is that the label is being used as a weapon of one industry against another and it seems to lose some of its original purpose in that context and that’s one of the problems of labels in general.

DAN CHARLES: Yes, it’s interesting. I mean, I forget who was talking earlier about misleading claims that have been put on packages. I think it was in the context of GMO-free. For instance on strawberry jam, you know, is not as far as I know a GMO product. But, isn’t all fair in love, war and commerce? I mean, isn’t this the great tradition of American capitalism?

GREG JAFFE: The FDA has talked about and the statute that Congress passed talked about not allowing misleading labeling out there. And I mean there’s a, you know, you can take different view of what is misleading and so forth, but I think some of the GMO-free claims that are out there are misleading to consumers and when we did focus groups it was interesting because consumers, you know, thought that some of those were trying to scare them, were trying to say that these were superior products, were trying to get a premium from those. And I mean, FDA does have a history of coming in there and regulating different kind of claims, for example, things like orange juice, whether it’s frozen or fresh, you know, concentrate, things like that, so that consumers have accurate information.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I would say that no, that’s not the way the system works, or should work. A brand is in an abstract way, a promise to the consumer, to the person who purchases it and food companies like mine spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money creating brands that consumers trust. And if we were to make a false or misleading claim for one of our brands, that eventually would out, the truth always ultimately outs and we would destroy the trust that we have tried to create for that brand. So that kind of buccaneer behavior really has no place in the marketplace and shouldn’t, should not and is not rewarded in the marketplace except in the very short term.

DAN CHARLES: Well then the problem solves itself is what you’re saying. Jonathan Frenzen, do you have a view on that?

. JONATHAN FRENZEN: I guess it’s, I go back to my question about the original intent of the label, and it seems to be lost, dangerously so, in the process. And that’s one of the issues that I’m most concerned about is that protecting the public is not necessarily the only goal here. It seems to be subverting the technology.

DAN CHARLES: We have, you already asked a question. Here’s a question from Ruiz Ascensio of Conmex. And I don’t know what that is, in Mexico.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: It’s an industry organization.

DAN CHARLES: An industry organization in Mexico. If you had to give priorities and cost analysis, I think this may well be to anybody on the panel who wishes to take it on. If you had to give priorities and cost analysis, how would you order these from most important to least important presumably? Biotech content, pesticides, pesticide residue I’m assuming, or perhaps pesticide applications on the original crop even if not evident in the final product, fertilizers, mercury and heavy metals, labor conditions and nutritional content. Interesting list. Should I read it again? Biotech content, pesticides, fertilizers, mercury and heavy metals, labor conditions and nutritional content. He adds an editorial content. It seems we are responding to publicity and not health challenges. Anybody want to give their own personal view on that?

CRAIG WINTERS: I think the nutritional information is extremely important. You know, we have a situation in the United States where a lot of people are eating a diet that doesn’t come anything close to the food pyramid that you see we’re supposed to be eating. And so I think that’s incredibly important. I think genetically engineered foods is something that’s an emotional issue like we’ve discussed today, and it’s something that even though it’s maybe not as important as nutritional facts, I would rate that second on that list. And we do have concerns about the pesticide residues. A lot of people don’t realize that pesticides that are illegal in this country that are being sold to South American countries, being sprayed on the crops and coming right back into the country and we’re eating them, so I would endorse seeing some of those other items on the labels.

GREG JAFFE: I’ll take a crack at it, though I’m not going to answer the question as exactly as the person may have liked. I think, for me and also for our organization, the issue, I think it is, it is a health issue and I think our top priority for labeling should be things that have health significance and safety significance. So for example, not on that list is allergens, which aren’t requirements of mandatory labeling of allergens in the United States, and yet there a number of people who die every year from eating foods that they have, that have things in them that they are allergic to. And so that’s something we push for. We push for labeling on eggs, so that people cook them the proper way and so that they can diseases from those. So I’m not going to say which of those things, although I agree with Craig that, you know, if we pushed hard for nutrition labeling and that does relate to diet and there have been cost benefit analysis talking about, you know, cholesterol and all the kinds of different diseases that we have related to how we it, and that nutrition labeling has helped in that. We’re pushing for trans-fat labeling. So I would say that you could break that list potentially into things that have direct health things versus things that have a right to know, where there may not be a health concern for some of those things, labor unions, for example, I would argue in the genetically engineered food area, it’s a right to know as opposed to a health and food safety labeling. And I think those in my mind would come second to the health issues first.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: I only add that there’s limited space on the package and there’s limited attention on the part of the public and you have to be very judicious on selecting what goes on and what doesn’t go on those labels. And I, it’s a difficult challenge to figure out where to draw the line and what deserves to be there and what doesn’t. The label, however, is not necessarily the best advice to enforce regulation for varying labor policy, etc. We should be relying on our government and other vehicles to go ahead and make sure that labor conditions and the quality of our food is protected and safe.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: Well clearly I think we’re in violent agreement here that the top priority is nutrition, nutritional content. That is what the label is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be what’s in the food, and the first four items mentioned by the questioner potentially raise issues of food safety, and I come back again to my litany. If any of these things raises safety issues, then it ought to be dealt with at that level. Unsafe foods should not be permitted on the marketplace. The label is not the place to deal with that. Labor conditions is a whole separate thing. I don’t personally think that that kind of information belongs on a label, but science and content based information about the nutrition and the ingredients in the product is absolutely what should be on the label. And I also agree with Greg that information about potential allergens is very important to consumers. We do it and we spend a lot of money making sure our systems don’t inadvertently by having runs that cross over, create misbranded products, because both he and Craig have pointed out, for some people, some allergens are potentially fatal. This is very serious stuff.

DAN CHARLES: If I recall correctly in the last farm bill, Congress actually passed some country of origin labeling for meat. That strikes me as, that is a labeling that is, at least a majority of the members of Congress decided that day, that consumers had a right to know, even though it had no nutritional impact as far as I would be aware. How does, for instance, how do you feel about that?

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I think that the judgment that Congress made, and I shouldn’t presume to speak for them on this, I think they felt that our system of inspection at the border was inadequate and that we had limitations on what we could require of countries, of the internal processes in countries that send us material, so this was kind of the least-worst alternative. Even still, some people among our trading partners are characterizing this as a kind of a crude barrier to trade, just as we have those disputes about our products. But I think if there had been a feeling that the regulatory system could, you know, could adequately assure the safety of these products, that might not have occurred, but that was the judgment Congress made.
GREG JAFFE: I mean, I’m not aware of why Congress chose to put that in or not, but I would say that there is evidence out there that meat plants that are from foreign countries, such as Mexico and other countries, don’t meet the standards that we require our meat plants meet in terms of a product that doesn’t have contamination in it, and that may have been one of the reasons behind it.

DAN CHARLES: Again, opportunity from the floor? Well, you’ve already had your question. I’m going to read from Mary Muth from Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. Will food manufacturers be reluctant to produce foods that have been, to produce foods? I think manufacture foods. Anyway, will food manufacturers be reluctant to put on the market foods that have been bio-engineered for enhanced nutrition or other consumer benefits because of potential negative consumer reaction to the fact that the foods have been bio-engineered? I’ll actually ask both Jonathan Frenzen and Austin to…

JONATHAN FRENZEN: I would expect so to the degree that a genetically engineered product is lurking in the background of a product, it’s less likely to come to the attention of the American public. If the primary benefit of a product is it’s nutritional quality being front and center, if that were to be the primary claim that it were genetically engineered, that would draw an unusual amount of attention to the status of the product and it would be harder to sell. I think they would be very careful about going forward with a product with those characteristics.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I think it’s sort an, there’s no simple answer to that. You’d have to look at the nature of the benefit, how powerful it was, and how compelling, how you would have to characterize that. I mean, as Craig said earlier that we’d be eager to label things that had those benefits. I think perhaps to split hairs, we’d be eager to make claims for those products, which is different from the other claim to be on the label as sort of, and maybe you admit that generically it’s the label as opposed to making a claim that this is genetically modified, you’d want to make a claim about what the health benefit. And I am aware of, of work that’s going on even today that, in the area of oils, which would, which would provide an oil that has less saturated fat, which would arguably be a real benefit, especially to old-timers like me, who have to kind of watch what we eat and keep our cardiologist happy. And yet there is reluctance to market those products. There’s caution I would say. There’s caution as you approach the marketplace.

CRAIG WINTERS: I think the biotech industry will definitely want to label those products that these are products they’ll probably charge a premium for, let’s say this example of a high lycopene tomato, which they actually just recently created. That’s going to be something they’re going to try to see at a premium price as a preventative measure for, in the case of this tomato, male prostrate cancer, and they’ll be proud to label that. And the campaign, we’re, our position on the genetically engineered foods is we think they should be labeled, but there’s three criteria we think need to be implemented. One is they need to be safety tested, as you would a new food additive or a new drug. Two, they need to be labeled because consumers have this right to know, and three, we want them grown in controlled environments so we’re not contaminating the entire ecosphere with these genetically engineered crops, which we really don’t know what the long-term environmental effects could be. There’s super weeds being created right now from the canola crops, so those three criteria, safety testing, labeling and controlled environments. And, oh, by the way, if you want to know more, our web site for the campaign is www.thecampaign.org.

DAN CHARLES: I was surprised you were able to find The Campaign still free.

CRAIG WINTERS: I was amazed no one had taken it.

DAN CHARLES: Okay. I’m just going, we’re running into the limits of our time. I’m just going to do two more questions I think, from the web cast. Sara from Washington, DC says using a market-driven voluntary labeling system is problematic. If, as consumer groups fear, genetic engineering should become a public health issue, then voluntary labeling means we as a system have failed to protect the underprivileged in our society because they will not be able to afford the more expensive GMO-free, or non-GMO, products. What if we had done this with other labeling issues, such as fat content? Greg, do you want to take that on?

GREG JAFFE: I mean, I’ll go back to what Austin said, and what I believe also, is that we shouldn’t be allowing genetically engineered foods on the market if they’re not safe. And we’re pushing for a mandatory approval system so that FDA determines that those are safe, but I agree with him. We shouldn’t use labeling, be it voluntary or mandatory labeling, as a surrogate for safety, and we shouldn’t be allowing them. I think I go one step farther than maybe Austin and FDA also in that, our view would be that we shouldn’t be creating foods with new allergens, and FDA’s policy clearly says if genetically engineered food has a new allergen, they’re going to label it. You know, our view is that allergy, allergens are serious things. People can die from allergens and so I’m hesitant to start adding man-made allergens. We get enough problems with natural allergens in our food supply. All our food is not safe. There are risks from eating natural foods, foods such as peanuts, and soybeans, and other things. Our view would be we shouldn’t, we should be safety testing these things, but we also should be maybe not allowing them if they have allergens or things like that in them.

DAN CHARLES: Okay. I’m going to call this the final question, unless we have a pressing one from the floor afterward. Ann Bellows, again from that busy bunch at Rutgers. Please comment on how the debate on GMO labeling would be applied to meat, eggs or dairy products. This is presumably from animals fed genetically engineered feed.

CRAIG WINTERS: The legislation as it reads right now, it’s introduced in Congress, HR-4814, would require animals that are fed genetically engineered ingredients to be labeled as a genetically engineered product, so that’s in regards to what the current legislation will be. Now right now, the European Union is considering new labeling legislation, what’s in effect right now was passed in May of 1998. It only requires soybeans and corn to be labeled in Europe, but they’re looking at wide reaching labeling legislation over there and then there’s the thought that if that’s passed, the moratorium that’s in place in Europe will come off. So it’ll be interesting to see what develops out of there as far as their labeling requirements.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I want to just great that gang from Rutgers and tell you I’m a Mercer County boy. I grew up 15 miles down the road from you guys. And while Craig has accurately described the European regulations, there are other regulations in other parts of the world, for example Australia and New Zealand, where in fact the animal products would indeed have to be labeled and I’m not sure what the rule is in Japan, but I think it may be true there, too. So there are different approaches to this in different parts of the world, so it’s not a settled question, obviously as to how one should proceed.

GREG JAFFE: I don’t think we would go that far. I don’t think there should be labeling needed just because it ate, because the cow ate genetically engineered corn. I would make the assumption in that question that in fact we’re talking about a transgenetic animal, in fact like that transgenetic fish or there will be transgenetic cows that are going on out there and I think that’s a different issue in there where a person won’t necessarily be eating the gene and the protein of that because it will be in that, in the steak that they’re eating or the fish they’re eating. I think that may need labeling, mandatory labeling.

DAN CHARLES: Yes. I’m aware that we’ve been carrying on this discussion as an US issue, but I think many of us in the room realize that the labeling that will have probably the most direct impact on the American food system and agricultural may be the labeling that presumably will go in the UK, in the United, in the European community over the coming years. But, and Japan, we’ll see how that develops. I’m going to allow each of the panelists to say just a few sentences, if anything occurred to you to sum up the most important thing that you want to leave with the group. I should also mention, and this may provoke another round of comments, but the Secretary of Health & Human Services, Tommy Thompson, did say just a few days ago that, if I remember it correctly, that labeling is a stupid idea, I think was the gist of it. What was the exact quote?

CRAIG WINTERS: “Mandatory labeling will only frighten consumers. Labeling implies that biotechnology products are unsafe.”

DAN CHARLES: So moving forward, this is a statement from the administration. I don’t get the sense that there is a groundswell in Congress to implement mandatory labeling. This is moving forward, it seems, in the European community. Within that context, looking forward, what are the thoughts, the concise thoughts, that each of you would leave with our audience today?
CRAIG WINTERS: Well [unintelligible] and if 93% of the American public wants these products labeled, you have to communicate that to your members of Congress. If you go to our web site we have letters there. We also have our Take Action pack. We printed a quarter million of these up and they’re getting out to members of Congress’ hands because there’s letters in the back here to send Congress. And it’s really a right we feel that Americans should have and we encourage people that are listening to this broadcast or viewing it on archive to take the effort to send those letters to Congress and let your voice be heard.

GREG JAFFE: I agree with you, Dan. I think that Congress doesn’t, won’t support mandatory labeling, I think the Bush administration clearly won’t support mandatory labeling and the food industry doesn’t support mandatory labeling, so I don’t see mandatory labeling happening in the next three years in the United States at a minimum. So discussing it is sort of an academic exercise to some extent. What I think, therefore, in the short term, is we need to figure out ways to get the consumers who want to know this information, that information. And that is a combination of things. One is I think we need to have a mandatory FDA approval system out there, so consumers are comfortable eating this, that there’s an independent determination that it’s safe, that we’re not just relying on the biotech company. And two, that we need to figure out ways to get the food companies and so forth to provide this information, maybe not in the label, but provide this information so that consumers who want to know about their product, who care about it because they’re vegetarians, because they’re Kosher, because they just want to know and decided to spend their money either in favor of genetically engineered ingredients or by avoiding genetically engineered ingredients so they can get that information. And I think there are ways out there to do that, but I think that right now, people who are in this debate talk about mandatory versus non-mandatory, and haven’t talked about all the other options that are out there that might actually get that information to consumers.

JONATHAN FRENZEN: I think I’d conclude by saying that there’s better mechanisms for regulating the safety of the food supply and the environment, and the FDA and the EPA and if you don’t feel you’re being adequately protected, be sure and go to the voting person and vote in the congressperson or the presidential administration you think can do a better job.

AUSTIN SULLIVAN: I would say for the sixth time maybe, that labeling is no substitute, no surrogate, for safety. No unsafe food should be allowed onto the marketplace. I think we should have a regulatory system in general and for biotech foods that is transparent and that provides consumers with a sense of confidence and trust that their interests are being protected. There may be differing views on that, but what we have to work toward is a system where there is a high level of confidence that nothing will be allowed on the marketplace that would in any way potentially injury somebody. And finally I think that the rules ought to be developed to allow manufacturers who wish to create products which are either not made with genetically modified ingredients or through some other process like organic, that suggests that kind of a claim, to make that claim, and to provide information on their packaging to consumers who, who wish to buy products that they feel have not been made with genetically engineered ingredients.

DAN CHARLES: I thank all the panelists for providing enough information to provide light and enough heat to keep it interesting. I want to thank the Pew Initiative on Agricultural Biotechnology and Food for allowing this meeting to happen, bringing us all together. Thank you the audience for coming. I think that is everything we need to know and we’ll adjourn until the next time that the issue reaches the front pages. So thanks, and you’re adjourned.