Venkat Raman
Auckland, September 6, 2024
The proposal of the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) to allow the global processed food industry to self-regulate will harm public health and place human lives at risk, says Gene Ethics, a not-for-profit Australian organisation.
“FSANZ disregards the health, well-being and safety of families, with decisions that unfairly favour the global junk food industry and its addictive, gene-edited, highly-refined, and ultra-processed fake food,” Gene Ethics Director Bob Phelps said.
FSANZ is reported to have announced that under its Proposal, called P1055 all gene-edited foods will be brought under self-regulation.
Mr Phelps said that gene-edited foods made with CRISPR which FSANZ calls New Breeding Techniques (NBTs), have a scant history of safe use as food and unknown future impacts on health and wellbeing.
Editor’s Note: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) is a technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms. CRISPR was adapted for use in the laboratory from naturally occurring genome editing systems found in bacteria.
“Definitions should be amended”
Mr Phelps asked FSANZ to amend the definitions of ‘food produced using gene technology’ and ‘gene technology’ in the Food Standards Code, to exempt from any regulation the gene-modified organisms, fermentations, and chemicals, used to make synthetic foods.
“The food industry would not be required to notify FSANZ and hence they can avoid any assessment, regulation, and labelling. Therefore, gene-edited fake meat, mock milk, synthetic seafood, processing aids, additives, nutritive substances, colourings, and flavourings and even those not yet invented, would be sold in secret,” he said.
According to him, shoppers will lose their right to know and choose their food products.
“Gene-edited foods would also greatly expand the supply of highly refined and ultra-processed foods (UPFs) which are rightly blamed for rising rates of disease such as obesity, diabetes, colorectal cancer and heart trouble even in young people. In its cost-benefit analysis of P1055, FSANZ claims that there is no hard evidence either way, but concludes that the benefits would outweigh costs,” Mr Phelps said.
“Dangerous ingredients”
Gene Ethics said in a press statement it believes that the proposed move ignores the substantial body of hard scientific evidence that UPFs, loaded with salt, fat, sugar, and synthetic factory-made ingredients, cause ill health and death.
“Gene-edited ingredients are a match for the Nova food classification system (Group 4) which defines UPFs as industrial formulations that deconstruct whole foods into chemical constituents, alter them, and recombine these with additives, into food-like products,” the press note said.
“Transnational corporations make, sell, and promote addictive UPFs, formulated to be convenient, affordable, hyper-palatable, to replace whole foods, and over-consumed. Gene Ethics calls on all members of the Food Ministers Meeting (FMM) and the Food Regulation Standing Committee (FRSC) to direct FSANZ to exclude from the human food supply all gene-edited and UPF ingredients, including those derived from NBTs (New Breeding Techniques) and other biotechnologies (GM and gene-edited),” it said.
Gene Ethics envisages a safer, more equitable and more sustainable GM-Free society, Mr Phelps said.
About Gene Ethics
Gene Ethics is a non-profit educational network of citizens and kindred groups. It seeks rigorous application of the precautionary principle, scientific evidence and the law to all proposed uses of genetic manipulation (GM) technologies and their products.
Gene Ethics generates and distributes accurate information and analysis on the ethical, environmental, social and economic impacts of GM. Its education programmes critically assess GM for the public, policy-makers and interest groups.
