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CORRECTED/Scrap "Frankenfood" Guidelines
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Progressive Portal
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Jan 24, 2005 02:50 PST
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ONLY APPARENT PURPOSE OF DRAFT FDA GUIDELINES IS
TO PROVIDE LEGAL COVER FOR THE BIO-TECH INDUSTRY
[From Beyond Pesticides <http://www.beyondpesticides.org>]
*** Comment by Monday, 24 January 2005 **
NOTE: The e-mail address for submitting comments in the "Take Action"
section below has been corrected. We apologize for the error in earlier
versions of this alert.
The federal Food and Drug Administration has developed a set of
recommendations for the biotech industry on "early food-safety
evaluation" of bio-engineered plants intended for food use. The
proposed guidelines do nothing to protect consumers, farmers, or the
environment from the potentially deadly and irreversible consequences of
food-supply contamination should an experiment go wrong. In fact, they
actually weaken, rather than fortify, the oversight of genetically
engineered crops.
The recommendations fall short in many areas:
* They are strictly voluntary. Companies developing new products are not
even required to notify the FDA. On the contrary, the guidelines seem to
discourage notification: They state, "It is not necessary to have a
meeting with [FDA] to communicate about your early food safety
evaluation of your new protein."
* The recommended "safety tests" do not comply with any set of standards
for testing. Widely accepted international standards for such tests are
simply ignored.
* Some of the recommendations are downright dangerous. For example, they
state that "If a protein has been evaluated in an early food safety
evaluation and no safety concerns are identified, we would not expect an
additional early food safety evaluation to be submitted if the same
protein is introduced into another plant species" – even though the
effects of introducing a protein could differ dramatically in different
species.
The guidelines provide no assurances of safety to the public. They
appear to serve no purpose except to provide legal protection for
carelessness in the biotech industry.
CONTINUED BELOW ...
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+ "SUPPORT ORGANIC FARMING"
+ Just one of the environmental buttons, stickers,
+ and flags available at:
+ http://www.progressiveportal.org/store/
+
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The current proposal should be scrapped and replaced with new, mandatory
rules that provide real protections. At a minimum, such rules should:
1. Require independent, mandatory pre-market assessment of genetically
engineered crops with respect to both human health and environmental
safety. The food-safety assessment should be at least as stringent as
internationally accepted testing standards.
2. Enforce a zero-tolerance standard for any contamination of the food
supply with any genetic material or gene product from a transgenic crop
(i.e., a crop with genes inserted from other species) that is undergoing
field testing and for which a full food-safety assessment has not be
completed.
3. Require that all experiments involving crops that have been
genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and/or industrial
compounds be conducted in greenhouses or similarly controlled
environments.
4. Require labeling of all foods that contain genetically engineered
material.
Submit your comments now – deadline is Monday, 24 Jan 2005.
Take Action
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E-mail your comments to fdadockets-AT-oc.fda.gov (change "-AT-" to "@"),
mentioning "Docket No. 2004D-0369" and, if you wish, borrowing from the
sample text at:
http://www.beyondpesticides.org/news/daily.htm
More Information
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FDA announcement of the guidelines, with a link to the full document:
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ANSWERS/2004/ANS01327.html
Center for Food Safety on the guidelines:
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press_release11_19_04.cfm
U.S. PIRG on the guidelines:
http://uspirg.org/uspirgnewsroom.asp?id2=14978&id3=USPIRGnewsroom
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