Oregonians “place a priority on personal freedom and individual choice in how we live our lives,” gushes the website supporting the campaign to disparage genetically engineered foods through mandatory labeling. And because we Oregonians are such rugged individualists, the reasoning goes, we must jettison a system that provides clear and simple options for consumers who don’t like genetic engineering and replace it with one that will mislead the less-informed and place a disproportionate financial burden on the poor. No, thanks.
Proponents of mandatory labeling have tried to sell their skewed notion of consumer choice to voters in California and Washington in recent years without success. Undeterred, they’re serving up a warmed-over version to Oregonians in the form of Measure 92, which voters who truly value transparency and consumer choice will reject.
The measure would require packages containing targeted foods to include one of the following descriptions “clearly and conspicuously”: “genetically engineered,” “produced with genetic engineering” or “partially produced with genetic engineering.” Bins and shelves containing unpackaged goods would have to be labeled accordingly, too. …
How can the appearance of labels containing factual information misinform consumers, you ask? The answer begins with the Food and Drug Administration, the federal government’s food-safety cop, which has declined to mandate GE labels for the simple reason that there’s no nutritionally valid reason to do so. Measure 92 would require what federal regulators, relying upon science, have denied: a label whose mere presence suggests that the food within differs in some nutritionally significant way from other foods. In other words, it will look like a warning, and consumers who have neither the time nor the inclination to follow debates like this one may act accordingly – which ultimately is what supporters of Measure 92 would like.
Protecting less-informed consumers from misleading labels would alone justify a “no” vote on Measure 92. But mandatory labeling almost certainly will raises food costs as well, which will have a disproportionate effect upon those with the least money to spend. Supporters of the measure, naturally, dismiss the pocketbook argument, but in this they’re at odds with the 2013 white paper by the Washington State Academy of Sciences, a panel created by the state Legislature to provide unbiased analysis on pressing and substantive issues. …
The panel determined that mandatory labeling would raise various costs for businesses, including those relating to the segregation of products along the supply chain. This, in turn, would lead to higher prices, which “would make consumers worse off, especially low-income consumers.” Though it’s impossible to predict how much costs would rise as a result of Oregon’s initiative, it would be naïve to assume that they wouldn’t go up at all. And poor Oregonians, despite supporters’ rhetoric about “personal freedom and individual choice,” would have little choice but to pay.
Choice, in fact, is one reason to support the status quo, which provides organic and voluntarily labeled non-GE products for anyone who cares to buy them, usually at a higher price. …
Oregonians may or may not like genetically engineered food products and the big companies that provide them, but such antipathy is a lousy reason to approve a measure that will mislead many consumers and place a disproportionate financial burden on those least able to carry it.
