GMO Labeling - The Political Lies and Deceptions Told Here

News about GMO’s are everywhere. Different issues about this are in the headlines of most articles. But despite of this being all over the article headings, most consumers don’t really fully understand all the things they should about GMO’s nor the labeling. GMO labeling is now a hot topic as not everything seems to have to have a GMO label and the requirements of labels are not enough! Check out the article we found over at Healthy Holistic Living.

First of all, it ain’t quite over yet. Second of all, it’s not an act anymore; it’s now an amendment to another bill that seems to have little to do with agriculture. The amendment was pushed forward in the Senate to be included in another bill, it’s deliberately confusing.

The amendment is to the Defund Planned Parenthood bill, S.764. As if it wasn’t unrelated enough, the specific amendment containing the GMO language is titled, “A bill to reauthorize and amend the National Sea Grant College Program Act, and for other purposes.” Let’s see, National Sea Grant College Program Act. I don’t see the agricultural or food connection there.

Let’s get one thing straight. S. 764 has already passed the Senate- last year in 2015, as well as the House of Representatives. What’s going on now is that the Senate was supposed to decide on and vote for or against any minor changes made to the Defund Planned Parenthood Bill and then send those changes to the House for approval. The proposed changes to this bill however, have little or nothing to do with Planned Parenthood and nothing to do with the National Sea Grant etc. The United States Senate has taken the first of three steps to use this unrelated bill as a vehicle to prevent states from labeling GMOs and to keep many GMOs unlabeled nationwide. Next up, the House of Representatives, then a signature from Obama.

It was evident that these elected officials were up to no good last week when they quickly voted to end discussion on the amendment, blocked any chance of a filibuster, and moved to jam it through before their month-long vacation on the taxpayer’s dime.

Just Label It (justlabelit.org) posted a paper that blasted the Stabenow-Roberts Bill in late June, 2016, when the bill was formulated as a separate stand alone bill instead of a sneaky amendment to an established act that is already law, stating “…the definition could exclude a significant number of foods or food ingredients from labeling, including foods made with GE beet sugar, GE soy oils, or even high fructose corn syrup.”

The “Just Label It” paper concluded: “Without greater clarification, the definition of bioengineering in the Stabenow-Roberts proposal could be read very narrowly to exempt many GE foods from the rest of the proposal’s labeling requirements.”

Read narrowly indeed, especially when the final decision is up to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. As governor of Iowa prior to being selected by Obama to head the USDA, Tom was hailed by Monsanto as their “politician of the year” for heavily favoring large scale industrial farming and genetic engineering.