Center for Food Safety files lawsuit against USDA in order to get court-mandated timeline on finalized bioengineered labeling law.

Jacqui Fatka, Policy editor

August 13, 2018

2 Min Read
USDA continues finalizing biotech food labeling rule
USDA

The U.S. Department of Agriculture continues to sort through more than 14,000 comments in the development of its mandatory food labeling law for foods made using genetic engineering (GE).

On May 3, 2018, USDA released its long-awaited proposed regulations for the mandatory disclosure of foods produced using GE. These rules will implement the 2016 federal law requiring those GE disclosures, establishing many details of how the disclosures will be implemented. The rules are the final step in a decades-long process of demanding and securing GE food labeling in the U.S. at the state level and now at the federal level.

The comment period closed July 3, and the law required that the regulations be finished by July 29, 2018. USDA said in a statement to Feedstuffs on Aug. 12 that it continues to work on finalizing the rules but offered no additional information on when it may release the final rule. “We are working through public comments and regulatory process to finalize the rule as quickly as possible,” a USDA spokesperson said.

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a federal lawsuit Aug. 1 against USDA for failing to release the rule by the required July 29, 2018, deadline. CFS said it is going to court in order to get a “mandated schedule for completion and judicial oversight of USDA to ensure timely completion of the rules.”

Related:Comment deadline closes for bioengineered labeling law

CFS recently filed a separate lawsuit over USDA's “unlawful withholding of internal agency documents related to the GE disclosure rule-making,” the group noted. Last year, CFS won a lawsuit over USDA's failure to publicly release a critical study related to the use of electronic or digital disclosures for foods using GE.

Many of the comments consumers filed stressed their desire to have “GMO” (genetically modified organism) instead of “GE” or “BE” (bioengineered) used in the labeling of products.

USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) must disclose BE foods and has proposed several potential “friendly” labels, including a sun with a smiling face or a plant and sun with the letters “BE.” Some of the comments also said the label should not have a positive connotation.

The Coalition for Safe, Affordable Food represents groups from farm to fork that supported enactment of the bill that called for USDA to establish labeling requirements. The coalition seeks defining the term “bioengineering” for a food that: "(A) contains genetic material that has been modified through in vitro recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) techniques, and (B) for which the modification could not otherwise be obtained through conventional breeding or found in nature.”

About the Author(s)

Jacqui Fatka

Policy editor, Farm Futures

Jacqui Fatka grew up on a diversified livestock and grain farm in southwest Iowa and graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications, with a minor in agriculture education, in 2003. She’s been writing for agricultural audiences ever since. In college, she interned with Wallaces Farmer and cultivated her love of ag policy during an internship with the Iowa Pork Producers Association, working in Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Capitol Hill press office. In 2003, she started full time for Farm Progress companies’ state and regional publications as the e-content editor, and became Farm Futures’ policy editor in 2004. A few years later, she began covering grain and biofuels markets for the weekly newspaper Feedstuffs. As the current policy editor for Farm Progress, she covers the ongoing developments in ag policy, trade, regulations and court rulings. Fatka also serves as the interim executive secretary-treasurer for the North American Agricultural Journalists. She lives on a small acreage in central Ohio with her husband and three children.

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