Mandatory food labelling, testing laws unworkable: ANZFA

Mandatory, industry-wide food labelling laws would be unworkable and create huge costs for businesses and consumers, according to Australia's peak food authority.

The Australia New Zealand Food Authority (ANZFA) was responding to media calls for all foods that were in any way connected to genetically modified processes to be labelled.

ANZFA spokesman Dr Michael Dack said such calls created the perception among consumers that Australian foods were not as safe as they should be.

"The food authority would totally reject that because we run safety assessments on all the GM foods sold in supermarkets and they are just as safe as other foods," Dack said.

Almost six months since GM labelling laws came into play, the only foods to be identified as such have been a brand of doughnuts and tinned Spam.

This is because the laws require labelling of only those foods where GM is in evidence in the final product, not in the manufacturing process.

According to the new rules, foods that need not be labelled include:

• Most highly refined foods where the refining process has the effect of removing the DNA and/or protein.
• Additives and processing aids that do not carry forward novel DNA or proteins to the finished product.
• Flavourings that exist in no more than 0.1 per cent in the final food.
• Food intended for immediate consumption that is prepared and sold from the food premises or vending vehicles, enabling consumers to request information on GM status.
• Products in which there is an unintentional presence of a GM food of no more one per cent per ingredient.

For this reason, Dack said, everyone would have consumed foods containing some form of GM. But he said this did not mean that every such product should be labelled.

"These suggestions for increased labelling are being put forward not by average consumers [but] by anti-GM lobby groups that have agendas of their own," he said. "I think calls for an increased degree of labelling has to be seen in that light."

Dack said the cost to industry of putting in place expensive GM identification systems would be enormous, and the cost would be passed down to consumers.

In addition, he said many foods such as GM canola oil were indistinguishable from non-GM canola oil in terms of its chemistry and biology, making it impossible to identify in an end product.

Dack said across-the-board GM labelling also raised the question of where to draw the line.

"Do you label food from an animal that has eaten GM feeds for example, or food from an animal whose parents ate GM feeds?" he asked. "Regulation that can't be properly enforced is bad regulation."