EU raises GM threshold for labelling

The European Commission has agreed that up to 1% of soya or maize in food can be genetically-modified without having to be labelled.

Other amendments to the regulations will compel suppliers to tell caterers the GM status of their products (Caterer, 14 October, page 4). It will also extend labelling to many additives and flavourings currently exempted, such as stabilisers, thickeners, and E-numbers like xanthum and lecithin. Highly processed oils and GM processing aids such as chymosin, used in vegetarian cheeses, are unlikely to be covered.

The 1% threshold is to protect suppliers from accidental GM contamination if they can prove they have sourced from non-GM suppliers. Inadvertent contamination can occur through cross-fertilisation in fields, or during harvesting, transport, storage or processing.

A spokeswoman for the Cabinet Office GM unit stressed that the 1% limit was not a blueprint for GM-free labels, which will be debated next month along with labelling of GM animal feed.

Critics complained that the threshold represented a 10-fold increase on the 0.1% ceiling adopted by many UK supermarkets. But the spokeswoman said it applied to total maize or soya content, and would be a smaller proportion of the final food. She added that the Government would press for a lower level once crop segregation and testing techniques had improved.

The new regulations will come into force during the first quarter of the New Year.