How does the Biotechnology Council live up to its first principle, "Respecting people around the world and their right to choose healthy food products that are best for themselves and their families", by opposing GMO labeling of foods? Seems to me we could better choose the foods we prefer and consider healthy if they were labeled as to GMO. Since more foods lately are GMO than not, they need to be labeled. Please explain.

Expert response from Cathleen Enright

Former Executive Director of the Council for Biotechnology Information

Thursday, 08/08/2013 23:49

Thank you for this question. I am very glad you asked it.  We absolutely do support the right of consumers to choose food that is healthy and nutritious.  And although we do not sell food products directly to consumers, we support food companies’ decisions to voluntarily label food products for the presence or absence of GMOs, so consumers who wish to can choose food that is not made with GM ingredients. Some companies have opted to use such voluntarily labels such as “USDA Organic."

We do support mandatory labeling of food, including GM food, if such food presents a safety risk to a certain population—for example, those allergic to a food ingredient.  We believe the harm in mandating labeling for GM food, just because it is a GM food, is that such a label would convey to consumers that foods made from the farmers’ crops grown with our seeds are less safe than, less nutritious than or somehow different from conventional or organic food.  

But there has never been any evidence linking a food-safety or health risk to the consumption of GM foods.  There are hundreds of independent studies that demonstrate this (check out independent studies at Biofortified), in addition to the determinations from scientific and regulatory authorities around the world that GM foods on the market are as safe and nutritious as their non-GM counterparts [see FDA information here]. A few studies have asserted that such a risk exists, but each of these studies has been found not to be credible, essentially “debunked” by the global scientific community.  

Examples can be found here:

• Long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize by Gilles-Eric Séralini (original paper, rebuttals and official retraction)

• A comprehensive letter to the editor requesting a "serious reconsideration of the recent paper by Seralini et al." signed by scientists from all over the world

• Nature: Hyped GM maize study faces growing scrutiny: Food-safety bodies slam feeding study that claims increased cancer incidence in rats

• Science Media Centre: Study on cancer and GM maize – experts respond
• Discover Magazine: When Media Uncritically Cover Pseudoscience
• Response of the Glyphosate Task Force to the study published in the journal Entropy