Gov. Peter Shumlin, a champion of the legislation, led a rally on the Statehouse lawn featuring the congressional delegation and members of VPIRG, an environmental group.
“This is a true David and Goliath story, a small state fighting against Big Food, Big Ag, Big Business, and Big Money in Washington,” Shumlin said. “We knew when we signed it that we’d have challenges, but we set up the Vermont Food Fight Fund and all of us said ‘We will take them on.’”
Vermont is the first state to require food companies to label products with genetically engineered ingredients. The Grocery Manufacturers Association and others sued the state over the mandate, and there are ongoing efforts in Congress to derail the state labeling mandate, Act 120.
A new Senate bill would require disclosure of genetically modified organisms in food products nationwide through a barcode or QR code, instead of a label. Consumers would need a smartphone with a code reader to determine whether a food has GMO ingredients.
The proposal was roundly criticized by all three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation, who vowed to fight the bill.
U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said the Senate proposal is “kind of stupid.”
“A lot of my colleagues who were against this down in Washington were bragging about how great GMOs were,” Welch said. “So I said ‘I hear ya, but if it’s so great — what they are — why don’t you want to brag about it by putting it on the label?’”
“You know what?” Welch continued, “They didn’t have an answer.”
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., also inveighed against congressional attempts to scuttle the Vermont law. As he arrived at the GMO party on the Statehouse lawn with his Secret Service detail the crowd applauded wildly.
“This legislation is important because people have a right to know what they eat, and what their children eat,” Sanders said. “The more information we have, the better consumers we are. This is not, as you all know, a radical idea, it is what over 60 countries all over this world have done.”
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he was returning to Washington before the Fourth of July recess ends to find a way to stop the bill. In March, Leahy led the effort to defeat an earlier bill that would have effectively pre-empted Vermont’s law.
A bill introduced last week, co-sponsored by Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., includes a number of provisions that the delegation finds problematic, including language that narrowly defines genetic engineering and does not allow for the inclusion of new technologies such as gene editing.
“This bill, the way it’s been done, it will allow so many things to go through the cracks,” Leahy said. “We can’t allow this to happen, I am not going to stand for this.”
Among the participants at the event was Sen. David Zuckerman, a lead sponsor in the state Senate and a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor. Zuckerman praised a foreign visitor, Quebec’s Agriculture Minister Pierre Paradis, who is looking to require GMO labeling in the Canadian province.
“While our friends to the north are moving forward, our friends to the south seem to be moving backward,” Zuckerman said.
