Dive Brief:
- In fiscal year 2015, U.S. states did not pass any legislation concerning mandatory or voluntary GMO labeling for food companies, leaving only Vermont to have such a law going into effect, which will begin July 2016. The 2015 legislative session is not completely done, but lawmakers at this point are focusing on the next fiscal year, according to Food Safety News.
- Many GMO labeling bills introduced by Congressional legislators died in state committees before ever making it to a floor vote.
- It appears more attention is now being taken away from separate state GMO labeling bills and focused instead on H.R. 1599, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015, which would put voluntary GMO labeling regulations in place rather than mandatory.
Dive Insight:
Now that the federal GMO labeling bill is up for discussion, state legislators could feel it would be pointless to try and pass a bill that will be preempted in the near future by H.R. 1599.
What this does do is offer Congress more time to work out the kinks surrounding GMO labeling to help make any proposed changes as easy on the food industry as possible. Legislators don't want to put out their constituents or burden businesses they support back home, so they would need to be sure that while they were trying to keep the food industry more transparent, the food industry also wouldn't get lost in a web of differing, if not contradicting, state, territorial, and federal labeling rules.
Interesting to note is that even for the bills that were introduced this year, few as they may have been, none had an official start date before July 1, 2016, the date Vermont's GMO labeling law goes into effect. It appears everyone still has his eye on Vermont and wants to see what happens in that state before bringing the same sorts of changes to others.