Should Sonny Perdue be confirmed as the next secretary of Agriculture, it will fall to him to end the biggest food fight of the past several years: GMO labeling. Congress passed a law last summer [2016] instructing USDA to finalize a federal disclosure standard for the presence of what it dubbed bioengineered ingredients, and gave the department until July 2018 to get it done. Lawmakers gave a definition of genetically modified ingredients and instructed USDA to allow companies to use a symbol, label or electronic disclosure to identify them. But Congress punted to USDA on a slew of issues, including what the symbol on the package denoting GMO ingredients should look like and the amount of genetically engineered contents a product must contain to trigger labeling — all of which will be left to Perdue to decide.
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But Perdue will have just 15 months to issue a proposal, take what are likely to be lengthy comments and put a rule in place. “They are being very cautious about waiting for the boss to get confirmed,” a pro-labeling advocate said. “This will be one of the things he spends a lot of time on, more than he should.”
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Perdue’s genetically modified rulemaking
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