US companies keen to label food as free of genetically engineered ingredients will have to wait until the government decides how to ensure that the claim is correct.
The food would have to be tested by the companies and checked periodically by federal inspectors to make sure it does not contain biotech products, said Lester Crawford, deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, writes the Nando Times this week.
"If it's on the label, it has to be true, and it's up to us to be sure that it is," Crawford told the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee on Thursday.
The FDA proposed labelling rules for non-biotech foods in January 2001, during the final days of the Clinton administration. But Crawford, an appointee of the Bush administration, said it could be months or even years before the rules are made final.
Genetically engineered soy and corn are used in a wide variety of foods and drinks. The FDA claims that the ingredients are just as safe as those produced by conventional methods.
Critics of biotechnology pushed the Clinton administration to require foods with gene-altered ingredients to be labelled as such, but the FDA refused. Instead, it proposed labelling rules for foods that are biotech-free.
The agency would likely allow genetically modified ingredients to make up no more than about 1 per cent of officially biotech-free foods. The FDA plans to check a portion to make sure foods meet the standard, but has not decided how much testing is needed for the results to be statistically valid, Crawford said.
The FDA has suggested several possible labels, including "We do not use ingredients that were produced using biotechnology" and "This oil is made from soybeans that were not genetically engineered."
Crawford also told the lawmakers on Thursday that the FDA has all but ruled out allowing the term "cold pasteurisation" on foods that have been irradiated to kill harmful bacteria.
The food industry has been slow to use irradiation because of consumer resistance to the term. In Europe it is still far from being widely accepted. In the US lawmakers have been pushing the FDA to allow such products to be called pasteurised.