Baylen Linnekin explains why compromise in the battle over genetically modified food ingredients is likely to be heartily supported by big business — because they can easily cover costs that their smaller competitors will not be able to afford:
Like it or not — and I’m in the not camp — a mandatory, uniform national GMO labeling scheme appears increasingly likely.
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Major players on the business side, including Walmart, America’s leading grocer, and General Mills, which bills itself as “one of the world’s largest food companies,” have publicly tipped their hands that they’d support some sort of mandatory labeling.
As I noted this summer, Walmart held a meeting with FDA officials and others from the food industry earlier this year where, it was alleged, the grocer and other food sellers that have opposed state labeling requirements would push for the federal government to adopt a national GMO labeling standard.
And just last week, Ken Powell, the CEO of General Mills, announced at the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting that the company “strongly support[s] a national, federal labeling solution.”
Powell’s comments are a game changer.
But do they mean that anti-GMO activists and food companies are on the same page? Not by a longshot. Powell made clear in his remarks that the company supports “a national standard that would label foods that don’t have genetically engineered ingredients in them, rather than foods that do.” (emphasis mine)
I suspect that anti-GMO activists would hate that solution because it wouldn’t provide the “information” they want and because all of the significant testing and labeling costs of the mandatory scheme Powell suggests — along with any liability for not testing GMO-free foods or for mislabeling — would be borne by the GMO-free farmers and food producers they frequent (and by their customers, in the form of higher prices).
