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by Linda Dulicai
I will warn you right here, this blog is somewhat political. Not political in the sense that bipartisan malfunction currently rules this country. Political in helping you understand how countries have and are giving up their sovereignty in issues around food.
So, what is the WTO? The World Trade Organization is an international treaty group founded in 1995 to much fanfare about free trade. It gives this body the power to sanction nations it deems interfere with that free trade.
Over the years there have been many complicated criticisms which deal with the transfer of power away from government to the trade treaty organizations. The pharmaceutical industry has used it to great advantage using Codex. As a side note Codex was slipped into the so called Food Safety bill in the wee hours of the morning of December 31, 2010 and signed shortly after without comment on the passage of Codex.
Now it has come back to haunt us again. After the mad cow disease scare a few years back a law was passed to label country of origin for meat. It made everyone feel safer and was a politically good move to show how much government cared for our welfare. In truth it meant little as the meat production industry is as challenged as almost anywhere in the world.
Now let’s fast forward to more recent events. Our neighbors complained to the WTO that labeling effectively shut them out of the US market and was protectionist. After several rounds of appeals they won. If the US did not pass a law repealing country of origin labeling we would be fined on a regular basis for being in violation. So, Congress did just that. They did it quietly in the budget bill while everyone was focused on making sure that the Dark Act on GMO labeling did not get slipped through.
So, now when you go to the grocery store you will no longer see where you meat came from. If you were concerned about popular issues like Chinese chickens or Argentine beef, worry no more, you will not know. It will be interesting to see if the WTO enforces labeling bans that keep our undesirable meat out of other countries. I hope they don’t. If they do it is unlikely our producers will ever clean up their act.
http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2016/jan/6-2 will give you a very nice detailed report on this subject.
http://www.fao.org/fao-who-codexalimentarius/en/ is the home page if you are unfamiliar with Codex.
A practitioner for more than 38 years, Linda Dulicai is a Certified Natural Health Professional and an Advanced Loomis Digestive Health Specialist educated in more than 25 modalities of wellness. She is CEO of The Healthy Zone.
