The United Nations advisory body on food safety, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, has adopted a landmark agreement on how to assess the risks to consumers from foods derived from biotechnology, including genetically modified foods, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a joint statement today.
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Altogether, Codex adopted more than 50 new food safety and quality standards, some of which are revisions of old standards. Codex standards are voluntary, but are often used as benchmarks in WTO trade disputes.
GM foods
Codex has adopted guidelines for assessing the food safety risks posed by foods derived from biotechnology. These guidelines lay out broad general principles intended to make the analysis and management of risks related to foods derived from biotechnology uniform across Codex’s 169 member countries. The guidelines concern food safety and not environmental risks.
Provisions of the guidelines include pre-market safety evaluations and product tracing for recall purpose and post-market monitoring. The guidelines cover the scientific assessment of GM plants, such as maize, soya or potatoes, and foods and beverages derived from GM micro-organisms, including cheese, yoghurt and beer. They include provisions for determining if the product may provoke unexpected allergies in consumers.
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By GlobalData“These guidelines are a very important step in understanding the risks associated with foods derived from biotechnology,” said Alan Randell, Codex secretary. “Now, any country, regulatory body or other organisation or individual will be able to compare the risk assessments of a given food derived from biotechnology with the assessments done by other countries. As long as the science is sound, each country wishing to use or introduce a given food derived from biotechnology will not have to redo the analysis, but can move directly to deciding how to manage the marketing of that food. Consumers can be assured that foods assessed by these methods are fit to eat.”
Irradiated foods
Codex also adopted a new standard for irradiated foods that accepts higher levels of radiation on food products. The irradiation process uses gamma rays to kill bacteria, increasing the food products’ shelf life. Codex determined that allowing higher levels of irradiation would eliminate bacterial spores and the radiation resistant pathogenic bacteria Clostridium botulinum.
Responding to consumer concerns about meat, Codex adopted standards that will improve the safety of meat by establishing principles of meat hygiene. A Code of Practice on good animal feeding calls for stricter and more systematic controls over sources of contamination.
Codex also adopted new quality standards for many other food items. For example, consumers will soon note the amount of cocoa in chocolate and chocolate products will determine when the term “chocolate” can be used. The new standard sets a minimum 35% of cocoa solids in products marketed as “chocolate” and a minimum 20% in “chocolate type” products, such as chocolate flakes. The new standard requires the minimum cocoa content to be clearly marked on the packaging of all chocolate flavoured products.
