GE food: what must be labelled

By ANNE BESTON and EUGENE BINGHAM

Shopping for groceries is to get more complicated with new rules on genetically engineered food.

Labels will be introduced in a year or so for food with more than 0.1 per cent of GE ingredients. Thousands of items will be affected - about 60 per cent of processed food has a GE component.

The changes could also mean more expensive food.

And the complexity of sorting ingredients will mean items such as tofu will be labelled, but not food colouring.

Under the rules announced by transtasman Health Ministers yesterday, foods with more than 0.1 per cent of GE ingredients will be labelled, but those sold at point of sale, such as fresh goods from supermarkets and meals from restaurants and takeaway outlets, will be exempt.

The agreement was reached at the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Council meeting in Wellington. The council comprises New Zealand Health Minister Annette King and Australian state and territory Health Ministers.

But Green Party MP and safe food campaigner Sue Kedgley said exempting highly refined foods made a mockery of the new regime.

Foods with no detectable GE ingredient in the final product, such as highly refined cooking oils or food colourings, would be exempt, even if they were made from GE crops or were genetically engineered at some stage during their manufacture.

"This will make manufacturers and retailers very happy, but not consumers," Ms Kedgley said. "Under this regime, many staple GE ingredients in processed foods such as oil, corn starches and sugars on supermarket shelves will be unlabelled."

But Mrs King said the new rules were the most comprehensive in the world and consumers would be pleased. She did not believe the regime was complex or contradictory. The Ministry of Health would police labelling, and anyone who broke the rules would feel the full weight of the law.

But Ms Kedgley said she would be asking where the money was coming from to monitor the labelling regime because it was not in the Budget.

The threshold at which labelling kicks in was a critical point for the ministers. The 0.1 per cent decision miffed the Australian Government, which had pushed for a softer 1 per cent threshold.

The meeting chairman, Grant Tambling, the parliamentary secretary to the Australian Minister of Health, said: "I was disappointed that the decision will require industry to test or determine whether DNA is present in areas of highly refined ingredients, processing aids, food additives and flavourings.

"We're concerned about the financial cost to industry and the cost of food to consumers."

The New Zealand Grocery Marketers Association executive director, Brenda Cutress, said the regime was "practical, enforceable, founded on sound science and was internationally defendable."

She said there was no logical reason to label products that did not contain substantially altered DNA or protein, such as highly refined oils, sugars and starches.

An estimate of a 5 to 10 per cent food price increase as a result of labelling for GE ingredients was now thought likely to be lower and "would need to be revised."

But consumers will not see GE-labelled food on the shelves for at least a year.

Future meetings of the ministers will set out the size of labels, where on packaging they must be displayed and exactly what they will say.

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