editor victoria’s comment ~ well this one goes in the “WTF” category….biofortified? biofortification is the process of creating crops to increase their nutritional value so we can clearly see that this is the wrong label. instead, how about we call GMO’s “nutritional noisome’s”…..
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Monday, January 28th 2019 at 4:00 pm
If you have ever been to Berlin, Germany in the late Fall, you know how miserably wet, cold, and windy it can be. The only real refuge from those elements is to be found indoors. But even then there can be events that drive you right back outdoors and into the elements. Such was the case with the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU), which was holding its 40th session during the week of November 26-30, 2018, in that city.
As most of you already know, the Codex Alimentarius Commission and its various committees spread throughout the World establish food standards and guidelines after an eight-step process of consideration and debate that are then usually adopted by the Codex member states. The Codex Nutrition Committee is just one of the many committees that develop these food standards and guidelines. It is also one of the committees with the most controversial issues.
Biofortification
Biofortification is a method of increasing certain vitamin and mineral content of basic food crops by the time-honored, conventional way of cross-breeding, and not through genetic engineering. Harvest Plus, the company behind biofortification, will for example increase the vitamin or iron content of sweet potatoes so that malnourished populations in developing nations will receive better nutrition. This is a very admirable goal, although I have argued at these meetings that perhaps it’s an unnecessary one if farmers would simply employ the proper farming techniques to prevent soil depletion and along with it the vitamin and mineral content of the foods grown in that soil.
For the last several years, the Codex Nutrition Committee has been crafting a definition for Biofortification. That definition would then be used uniformly around the World to apply to those foods conventionally fortified with higher levels of nutrients and everyone would be on the same page whenever the term “biofortified” was used. Indeed, the National Health Federation (NHF), a health-freedom organization accredited by Codex to participate in its meetings and the one whose delegation I led there, was an early supporter at Codex of this definition.
We have already gone through the sordid history, in detail, of how the draft definition of Biofortification had been infused with the disease of GMOs.1 I won’t repeat that history here. Just know that, now, the term Biofortification will have huge ramifications for the entire World. If the pro-GMO forces can succeed in continuing to hide their genetic-engineered foods within the definition of Biofortification and in using its appealing, natural-sounding name to sell their GMO foods, then consumers will be deceived on a worldwide scale.
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