[A]ttorney General William Sorrell says the nearly $2 million the state spent to fight for a law requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods was well spent even though the law lasted barely three weeks.
Sorrell said the two-year battle with the Grocery Manufacturers Association and one of its lead corporations, Monsanto, was costly. The trade group sued Vermont shortly after the GMO bill was signed by Gov. Peter Shumlin in 2014. The law went into effect as scheduled on July 1 this year.
Three weeks after the Vermont law kicked in, Congress passed a compromise national law requiring manufacturers to identify genetically modified ingredients, but it also said states could not have their own labeling laws.
“It is a shame we were winning the court fight and successfully defending the statute, but lost in the halls of Congress to a horde of highly paid lobbyists. Still, the glass is certainly half full,” Sorrell said. “We will have a national GMOs labeling requirement, largely due to Vermont’s efforts to lead the nation in this endeavor. Vermonters have every right to be proud of the role we’ve played in fostering better food labeling disclosures for consumers.”
Erin Sigrist, president-elect of the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, said the Vermont law cost her members more than $5 million, including staff time trying to comply. Much of that time, she said, was taken up with members talking to manufacturers about whether any genetically modified ingredients were in their products, to see if they had to be labeled.
“It was a significant impact for three weeks’ worth of being in compliance,” Sigrist said.
According to Sorrell’s office, the total cost to the state for defending the law was nearly $1.94 million. Of that, $417,000 was for salaries and benefits in the attorney general’s office. The state paid $1.4 million to Robbins Russell, a law firm that worked as outside counsel, $83,000 for expert witnesses and $36,000 in other expenses including travel, transcripts and local counsel for out-of-state subpoenas.
The Legislature allocated $1.5 million for the effort, plus the public donated $550,000 for that purpose. Sorrell said his office took in about $30 million in settlements last year and was on track for the same amount this year.
The national law directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create a labeling standard within two years that requires food producers to use text, symbols or QR codes consumers can scan with a smartphone to find out if a product contains genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
Sorrell has criticized that approach, saying the proposed disclosure requirements were not as consumer-friendly as having the item labeled with text, as Vermont’s law mandated.
“As I understand the bill, you have to have a smartphone with a bar code reader to see (the ingredients) or you can call an 800 number,” Sorrell told Agweb News. “How many consumers do you think are going to do that when they’re standing there with two cans of soup trying to decide which one to buy?”
Sigrist said her organization supports a national standard because having different standards in different states would be hard for manufacturers to comply with.
“We’re still waiting to hear about all the developments” in the rule-making “so we can better understand how it will affect Vermont,” Sigrist said.
