I want to personally thank you for your tireless efforts over the last year in contacting members of Congress and the President to stop the DARK Act. We’ve asked a lot from you these past few months, and while we didn’t win this round, the hundreds of thousands of emails, faxes, calls, and tweets you and other CFS members sent opposing this bill raised the issue to a level we’ve never seen before - so much so that together, we were able to stop this law in its tracks twice, once last year and again this past March. Sadly, too many in Congress are simply bought and paid for by big biotech and food companies.
This past weekend, the DARK Act went into effect as President Obama quietly signed the bill on Friday despite hundreds of thousands of us asking him not to. This means the GMO labeling many of us across the country have seen on products could soon disappear.
But the fight doesn’t end here. CFS will be filing a federal lawsuit in the next two weeks asking a court to declare the law unconstitutional on a number of grounds and to restore our democratically decided upon labeling laws.
David, we need your support to launch this lawsuit and protect our right to know. Be one of the first to pitch in now >>
This will be a major battle to defend the rights of consumers and farmers to choose to avoid GE foods and seeds. Once again, CFS’s legal and science team will be taking on the world’s most powerful industrial food and chemical corporations and their highly paid lawyers.
But we are used to waging successful legal battles against powerful forces. As a result of past CFS litigation and other efforts, we have stopped numerous GMO crops from being introduced and commercialized; defended county GMO crop bans; banned GMOs from all National Wildlife Refuges in the U.S.; and many other victories protecting our food, our health, and our environment.
The DARK Act is a legislative train wreck. It preempts the GE food labeling laws of Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut, as well as seed and GE fish labeling laws. In place of these laws, the bill gives the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) two years to establish standards for GMO food labeling allowing companies and producers to use “digital” labeling (a.k.a QR codes) and 1-800 numbers to label food products that contain GMOs.
The idea that consumers would have to call or use their phones on each and every product they buy is absurd. And since more than 100 million Americans, mostly the rural elderly and low income, do not even own smartphones, they will not even have access to the digital labeling the law promotes. What’s worse, the law’s narrow definition would exclude many, and perhaps most, current foods containing GE ingredients from any form of labeling.
CFS has no intention of letting this anti-democratic, discriminatory, fake labeling bill stand. But in all of our battles to defend our democratic rights and protect farmers and communities, we perform all of our legal work free of charge. In these lawsuits, CFS in-house attorneys and scientists spend many thousands of hours arguing these cases all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Private law firms would charge many millions of dollars for this amount of legal work and expertise. Even working on public interest salaries, these cases cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in work and expenses. But we know this is a fight worth fighting, and we need your help.
CFS remains committed to working with all of you, our members, to transform our current toxic industrial food production into a safe, healthy, humane and ecologically sustainable food system. And we will always fight for every American’s right to know about the food they buy and feed their families.
Thank you for your continuing support,
Andrew Kimbrell
Executive Director
Center for Food Safety
Contact Us
CFS welcomes your questions and comments. Please contact us at office@centerforfoodsafety.org, or at one of our offices.
National Headquarters
660 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, #302
Washington, DC 20003
phone (202) 547-9359 | fax(202) 547-9429
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