Colorado Eco-Justice Ministries – Label GMOs

Yesterday, the Board of Directors of Eco-Justice Ministries voted to endorse the "GMO Labeling" initiative that will be on Colorado's ballot this fall.

September 12, 2014 | Source: Eco-Justice Ministries | by

For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page and our Colorado News page.

 Yesterday, the Board of Directors of Eco-Justice Ministries voted to endorse the “GMO Labeling” initiative that will be on Colorado’s ballot this fall.

Colorado’s Proposition 105 is similar to Oregon’s Measure 92. (Our colleagues, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, are supporting the measure in their state.) For 2014, our two states are the setting for the battle over mandatory labels on food products specifying whether they contain genetically modified ingredients. It promises to be a noisy, well-funded, highly polarized fight.

The support of Eco-Justice Ministries for the Colorado initiative (we’re based in Colorado) is — I hope — more nuanced than the sound-bite arguments that will be on TV ads and postcards this fall. The ballot measure raises significant issues about our economic system, informed choices, public health and ecological sustainability. Today, I’ll touch on some of the factors that have influenced my support.

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Right to Know Colorado says, “Our movement is built on the foundation that we have the basic right to know what is in our food and what we are feeding our families.” To which I say, yes, but there is far more at stake than that.

We

do have a right to know what is in our food. One of the core principles of a free market economic system is that buyers and sellers are both to be “fully informed” about their transaction. If purchasers consider the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) important, they should have access to that information.

“Fully informed” does not mean that the seller gets to define what is meaningful information. Many food producers assert that there is no significant difference between conventional crops and the GMO counterparts. The US Food and Drug administration — which does not require labeling — says, “The use or absence of use of bioengineering in the production of a good or ingredient does not, in and of itself, mean that there is a material difference in the food.”

But the science about the long-term health and safety of GMO foods is not settled. There are unresolved questions about the cumulative impact of pesticides and herbicides that are carried by the modified organisms. (Most of the labeling controversy is about crops — corn, soybeans, etc. — that are modified to withstand herbicides like Roundup, or that produce systemic pesticides like the BT toxin. There are different issues about GMO animals, such as salmon.) A dietician writing on the topic calls the presence of GMO in our food since 1996 “the largest research study ever conducted in the United States” — we’re still finding out whether there are health effects, including organ damage, infertility, and immune system changes.

At the most basic level, the GMO labeling question is a power struggle — do buyers have a right to demand that sellers disclose information that the buyers believe is important? I stand firmly on the side of disclosure.

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I am frustrated, though, that the political framing of the ballot initiatives is so tightly focused on “what we are feeding our families.” Larger issues of environmental health are far more compelling to me.