food labelling review

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) and the Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council (Ministerial Council) have agreed to undertake a comprehensive review of food labelling law and policy.

Related Information

Review of Food Labelling Law & Policy (homepage)

Read the Issues Consultation Paper

Find the nearest public consultation meeting in your city

How to make your submission to the review (closing date 14th May 2010)

Prefer to send us your comments for inclusion in our submission? Click here

your chance to have a say

The government is currently reviewing food labelling in Australia and is calling for public submissions. If you have an opinion on what's wrong with existing food labelling or ideas on what should be done to improve things, then now's the time to take action. The review panel held an initial round of submissions in November 2009 and received over 6,000 submissions, even though the review was only open for a month and supported with very little publicity.

The panel has released an "Issues Consultation" Paper which raises 39 questions for further public comment. However, the Consultation Paper dimisses any public health concern over genetically modifed (GM) food and even strays into misleading commentary.

Sustainable Melbourne summarises these concerns:

  • Section 3.1 of the paper states that GM food must have a label. In fact loopholes in the current food standard means that most GM food escapes labelling.It is estimated that up to 70% of processed food contains GM ingredients. How many GM food labels have you seen?
  • Section 3.11 implies that GM, nano-technology and irradiation have no public safety concerns
  • Section 3.16 implies that labelling GM, nano-technology and irradiation will cause these technologies to be “inhibited”. This truly bizarre statement prompted MADGE (Mothers Are Demystifying GE) to issue a media release saying “If, as this review suggests, GM, nanotech and irradiation only have a future if they are hidden, consumers need to be extremely concerned.”
  • Section 2.5 lists the objectives of FSANZ, our food standards agency responsible for food labelling, as:
    • (a) the protection of public health and safety;
    • (b) the provision of adequate information relating to food to enable consumers to make informed choices; and
    • (c) the prevention of misleading or deceptive conduct.

    Indeed, supermarket aisles are now carrying products with ingredients that are likely to be derived from GM crops. Worringly for any person is that loopholes in current food labelling legislation means that food manufacturers don't have to disclose which products contain GM ingredients.

    CHOICE recently found that "our GM labelling laws were supposed to allow consumers so see which products contain GM ingredients. Instead, we've ended up with a situation where the majority of products that are likely to contain GM ingredients don’t have to be labelled as ‘genetically modified’. When CHOICE went shopping, we struggled to find a product that was labelled as ‘genetically modified’ yet the list of foods that could contain GM ingredients is endless".

    We consider it in the public interest that all foods that directly contain GM ingredients or use GM-derived ingredients in their manufacture or processing should be disclosed clearly on the product labelling, and this disclose must be mandated by legislation.

    If you have any concern over GM foods in our society, please consider either making a submission yourself to the Labelling Review Panel (see side bar for links to their website and submission form), or send through your comments to us for inclusion in our submission.