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Farm Bureau supports national GMO pre-emption bill

The American Farm Bureau Federation’s board of directors has decided, somewhat reluctantly, to support the GMO labeling bill developed by Senate agriculture leaders.

Even though Farm Bureau policy opposes mandatory GMO labeling, the Farm Bureau board of directors voted Monday to support the GMO labeling compromise in the Senate. In an interview with Brownfield prior to that vote, Farm Bureau vice president Scott VanderWal of South Dakota said it was important to prevent Vermont’s GMO labeling law from going into effect.  “The main issue is really to head off a patchwork of state requirements as far as GMO labeling goes across the United States,” he says.

But the Farm Bureau’s chief lobbyist in Washington, D.C., Mary Kay Thatcher, says passage of the Senate compromise is not necessarily a done deal.  “I’m not sure they have the 60 votes in the Senate,” she says.  “And I’m not sure the House has decided they would necessarily take the Senate Bill.  You know there’s been discussions there about ‘let’s have a conference’.  Well, given the time frame that would be a really difficult thing to do.”

So even though they’ll support the labeling compromise now, Thatcher and VanderWal say they are concerned about the precedent being set by labeling a food product that has no safety issues.

In a release from AFBF, president Zippy Duvall says the bill is far from perfect.  But says, “It correctly puts the federal government in the driver’s seat in important areas as protecting interstate commerce and new crop development techniques.”

 

 

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