"Food Standards Guidelines" Threaten Human Health, Codex Alimentarius (CA) serves corporate interests

by Stephen Lendman Global Research, August 24, 2009

On its web site, CA (Latin for food code) says:

"The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN) and WHO (World Health Organization) to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations."

Whatever its founding purpose, CA is much different today because corporate interests control it - global pharmaceutical, food, and banking giants in league with complicit UN and government agencies to promote GMOs over healthy foods, and drugs over natural remedies by restricting or banning vitamin and dietary supplements, except ones they control. Organic food as well by irradiation and hidden synthetic additives or ingredients.

If CA's standards and guidelines are adopted, they'll establish binding global rules, effectively overriding sovereign national laws. GMO foods and drugs will proliferate. Labeling will be banned. Food and drug giants will decide what will and won't be sold. Governments will be prohibited from countermanding them. Everyone's health and well-being will be jeopardized.

Since its 2004 founding, the Natural Solutions Foundation has been involved in "discover(ing), develop(ing), demonstrat(ing) and disseminat(ing) natural solutions to the problems facing us and threatening our health and freedom." Its goal is "to support advanced healthcare and health freedom" globally, not a system promoting corporate interests at the expense of human health and well-being.

It explains that CA has "absolutely nothing to do with consumer protection." It's a corporate-run "Trade Commission" created to control "every aspect of how food and nutritional supplements are produced and sold to the consumer." It's about profits, not human health. It wants to ban natural remedies and promote unsafe drugs. It's "unscientific because it classifies nutrients as toxins and uses 'Risk Assessment' to set ultra low so-called 'safe upper limits' for them." It wants to prohibit everything not explicitly permitted and controlled by them.

Under the 1986 - 1993 GATT Uruguay Round, its 110 member countries agreed to harmonize their domestic laws to conform to international standards. In January 1995, the WTO replaced GATT, and as of July 2008, its membership included 153 nations.

Its Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade was established "to ensure that regulations, standards, testing and certification procedures do not create unnecessary obstacles. It specifically refers to:

-- ...."the important contributions that international standards and conformity assessment systems can make....by improving efficiency of production and facilitating the conduct of international trade....;" and

-- the importance of "develop(ing) such international standards and conformity assessment systems."

It states that "Members are fully responsible under this Agreement for the observance of all provisions of Article 2" - pertaining to the "Preparation, Adoption and Application of Technical Regulations by Central Government Bodies;" under them, "Members shall formulate and implement positive measures and mechanisms in support of the observance of (Article 2's) provisions by other than central government bodies."

This means that WTO members are legally bound under global guidelines, including CA standards if adopted, that override currently in force national laws. Under WTO rules, failure to comply may bring punitive fines or crippling trade sanctions.

At its July 2005 session, the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU), drew up guidelines that set restrictive upper dosage limits on popularly used vitamin and mineral supplements and nutrients. They prohibit the sale of all curative, preventative, and therapeutic supplements without a doctor's prescription, most now accessible over-the-counter at health food, other stores, or by mail order.

Twenty-six other committees are tasked with setting global standards for different areas of the global food and drug trade, including:

-- fruits and vegetables;

-- fruit and vegetable juices;

-- fats and oils;

-- meat, poultry and fish;

-- cereals, pulses (used for food and animal feed) and legumes;

-- milk and milk products;

-- natural mineral waters;

-- sugars;

-- cocoa products and chocolate;

-- food hygiene;

-- food labeling (as a way not to disclose GMO foods and ingredients)

-- pesticide residues;

-- residues of veterinary drugs found in foods;

-- food additives;

-- regional coordination, and more.

Codex standards are binding on all WTO members under its Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. Both were included among the Multilateral Agreements on Trade in Goods that was part of the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO.

Currently, it says that "there is no legal obligation on Members to apply Codex standards, guidelines and recommendations." In fact, the WTO uses them to resolve international trade disputes that are legally binding on all members.

On December 31, 2009, Codex standards will be globally mandated unless legal challenges prevent it. In force, they'll override food and drug laws of all member countries, including consumer protection ones and America's 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). It classifies nutrients and herbs as foods, sets no dosage limits, and permits the sale of all dietary supplements unless expressly proved unsafe. Codex rules reverse things by prohibiting everything NOT proved safe, including high potency, therapeutically effective nutrients and supplements.

Common foods, herbs, nutrients, amino acids, homeopathic and other natural remedies would be called drugs. Potencies would be limited, and prescriptions would be required for their use. Some would be banned altogether.

In contrast, about 300 dangerous food additives will be allowed, including aspartame, BHA, BHT, potassium bromate, and tartrazine. New guidelines will authorize the worldwide proliferation of unlabeled GMO foods, drugs, and ingredients, known to harm human health.

In addition:

-- dangerous high-potency industrial chemicals, pesticides, and fungicides will be allowed, ones now near-universally banned, including aldrin, hexachlorobenzene and toxaphene;

-- growth hormones for cows will be mandated;

-- antibiotics as well for all "food herds, fish and flocks;"

-- irradiation will be required for all foods not locally grown and sold raw and unprocessed; and

-- new standards will permit dangerous toxic levels (0.5 ppb) of aflotoxin in milk produced from moldy storage conditions of animal feed; aflotoxin is one of most potent carcinogenic compounds known.

In addition, professional written, oral or other nutritional advice will be banned, including about the benefits of vitamins, minerals, nutrients and other health-promoting substances. Henceforth, they'll be considered toxins or poisons to be removed from food because Codex will prohibit their use to "prevent, treat or cure any condition or disease."

In America before the 1996 Food Quality and Protection Act passed, the 1958 Delaney Clause prohibited use of known carcinogens in processed foods. It specifically said:

"the Secretary of the Food and Drug Administration shall not approve for use in food any chemical additive found to induce cancer in man, or, after tests, found to induce cancer in animals."

It protected against unsafe food additives, meat and poultry drugs, color additives, and cancer-causing pesticide residues in processed foods above a certain level.

Obama's Enforcers

On July 23, Obama appointed Monsanto vice-president and lobbyist Michael Taylor as food safety czar - the man Jeffrey Smith, author and leading GMO foods critic, called "The person who may be responsible for more food-related illnesses and death than anyone in history....This is no joke....What have we done?"

At FDA in the early 1990s, Taylor headed policy over letting Monsanto's GM bovine growth hormone (rBGH) be injected into cows to increase milk supply despite the known health dangers. He also kept containers from being labeled to warn consumers. Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand banned the drug because of the significant cancer and other risks.

Taylor also got the FDA to treat genetically modified foods and ingredients as "substantially equivalent" to natural ones, so no testing was required for safety. Ever since in America and many other countries, GM foods have proliferated despite reliable evidence of their harm to human health.

Rumored to become USDA's food safety head is Dennis Wolff - an rBGH-using dairy farmer and Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary. Wolff spearheaded state legislation to ban rNGH-free labeling so consumers could choose safe milk over contaminated brands. He partially succeeded when governor Ed Rendell balked but allowed an FDA disclaimer on containers regarding bovine growth hormone's safety.

Operation Cure All

A June 14, 2001 FTC press release headlined "Operation Cure All Wages New Battle in Ongoing War Against Internet Health Fraud." It cited a 1997 initiated law enforcement and consumer education campaign in announcing new actions against "the fraudulent marketing of supplements and other health products on the Internet" targeting dietary supplements, herbal products, and various other "questionable" substances. The FDA claimed (without evidence) that "unscrupulous marketers (were selling to) the sickest and most vulnerable consumers." To the general public as well that relies on them as essential nutrients and natural remedies that are far more effective, safer, and vastly cheaper than dangerous overpriced drugs.

At stake isn't consumer safety. It's protecting drug company profits by eliminating competition. It's about removing safe alternatives, natural therapies, and information about them. It's to empower drug giants and approve only their products for sale. It's to establish standards they alone write; to pave the way for mass-marketing of genetically modified foods and drugs. It's a stepping stone toward mandated harmful global Codex rules.

Codex Alimentarius - A Sinister Scheme for Profit at the Expense of Human Health

Empowering Ag and drug giants through CA poses an unacceptable danger to humanity as Dr. Rima Laibow, Medical Director of the Natural Solutions Foundation, explains:

-- it will replace "safe upper (nutrient) limits with junk science;"

-- reduce them to useless levels; and

-- call essential-to-life and well-being nutrient levels toxic or poisonous.

Adequate nutrient levels are vital to "health and longevity. Nutrients are essential components of enzyme function in the human body and enzymes are the very stuff of life because they carry out every biological process in your body. Without enzymes, nothing would happen. Literally."

"There would be no digestion, no growth, no detoxification....no life. At any moment, approximately 35,000 enzymatic reactions are occurring in every cell in your body. Nutrients feed and support enzymatic action and that's why they are so crucial to health."

At optimum levels, they produce optimum health. At impaired levels, symptoms. At unhealthy levels, illness, and "No enzymatic action = death." Varying human nutrient needs depend on "genetic diversity and requirement, diet, climate and energy output, toxic load (from food, water, air, and skin absorption), underlying nutritional deficits, (and all types of) diseases and stress." In sum, it's called "Biological Individuality - a concept "totally absent from the philosophy of Codex Alimentarius."

According to Laibow, there is no "scientifically measurable 'upper limit' for nutrients" because their potential toxicity is "astonishingly low" even though at times "more is not necessarily better." DSHEA prohibits nutrient upper limits because they're foods, not drugs. "Scientifically, DSHEA is right on the mark." CA is pseudo-science for profit at the expense of human health. Legal challenges have five months left to stop them.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendman.stephen@sbcglobal.net.

Link to this article: