Senior foreign affairs bureaucrats have told members of the House of
Commons health committee that they should consider the potential costs
of mandatory labels on genetically modified food.
The committee is holding hearings into the labelling issue and many
members already have said they favour mandatory labelling.
Foreign affairs officials came to suggest they consider the possible
downside.
Claude Carriere, director general for the foreign affairs department’s
trade policy and chief Canadian negotiator for the Free Trade Area of
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the Americas, said mandatory labelling could violate Canada’s
international trade commitments and lead to American retaliation.
“Most significantly, mandatory labelling might jeopardize $25 billion
in bilateral agri-food trade.”
Many committee members were unimpressed, particularly when Carriere
conceded that the lack of GM labelling was shutting Canadian exporters
out of markets such as the European Union and China.
His argument that the American market is more important, representing
billions of dollars compared to hundreds of millions in lost GM
labelling markets, won little sympathy.
And many MPs challenged the idea that the cost of GM labelling and the
segregation and traceability system is as onerous as critics say.
“You are saying people don’t have the right to know what they are
eating,” said anti-GMO Bloc Québecois MP Marcel Gagnon.
“I think this is a type of dictatorship that is unacceptable.”
Liberal MPs also challenged the trade angle.
Carriere said a University of Guelph study suggested mandatory labels
could add up to 41 percent to food system costs and up to 10 percent to
consumer food costs.
“I have trouble believing those cost numbers,” said Quebec Liberal MP
Hélene Scherrer.
Thunder Bay Liberal Stan Dromisky said he was suspicious of the cost
estimates. Critics of change always can find studies and numbers that
make it seem unrealistic, he said.
The “ulterior motive” of companies opposing labelling is their profit
margin rather than human health, Dromisky alleged.
