Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEWHOUSE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Kansas.

As a third-generation farmer and a former director of my State's Department of Agriculture, I cannot stress enough the importance of this legislation for our Nation and our world's food supply.

Yesterday, I spoke on the merits of preventing a patchwork of conflicting State and local GMO labeling laws which would require producers to sell under potentially hundreds of different labels, and I still believe that is a very important element to this debate.

However, there is another aspect I would like to address on why I believe this mandatory labeling law, which some of my colleagues have called for, is a very poor idea.

Mr. Chairman, I question the motives behind some of these arguments. They say they ``want consumers to have information'' but that can't actually be their concern because this legislation gives consumers information. It is disingenuous to claim it doesn't.

If you want to go to a store and buy a ``non-GMO'' product, much like ``organic'' or ``cage-free,'' you can do that under this legislation. It will provide consumers all the information they need to purchase food they think is right for their families.

So what is their motive?

Is it they want to try to scare consumers, to demonize this technology?

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Mr. NEWHOUSE. Mr. Chairman, antiscience, fear-mongering strategies cannot be left unanswered. I believe there are a few things people should know about biotechnology.

First, I appreciate anyone's safety concerns. That is why it is important to note that the USDA and the FDA rigorously test every biotech crop for human safety for years before anything can be brought to the market.

To be clear, no peer-reviewed study--and there have been hundreds--has ever found GMO foods have caused health concerns, ever.

Individuals have concerns about environmental impacts. I appreciate that, too. But what many people don't know is that, by turning on just one gene in corn, we now have a corn that is significantly more pest-resistant, which means huge reductions in the use of pesticides. We can do this with other crops as well. To be probiotech is to be proenvironment.

There is a type of rice that is vitamin A-enriched and has the ability to prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness and death from vitamin A deficiency around the world.

There is a really nasty type of wheat rot called UG-99 spreading from Africa and the Middle East that has the ability to kill 90 percent of the world's wheat supply.

To be clear, this would cause a global famine. Scientists are looking at a way to create rot-resistant wheat through biotechnology and gene sequencing, which would save millions and millions of lives.

Mr. Chair, this technology is good proenvironment, lifesaving technology. And while I agree we need to have a system to give consumers the freedom to use it or not, which this bill does, we cannot allow antiscience opponents of biotechnology to use scare tactics that would cost millions of lives in the end.

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