Attorney: ‘You can’t keep getting sued over label claims that don’t have a substantive bearing on the food’
Will the FDA put us all out of our misery and make a decision asap on whether GMOs belong in foods marketed as ‘natural’, as judges handling class action lawsuits over this issue are hoping?
In the short term the answer is NO, says Tony Pavel, a partner at law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius.
However, it does now seem increasingly likely that we might get an answer in the next couple of years or so, said Pavel, who caught up with FoodNavigator-USA at the IFT show.
“I think in the next one to three years we’ll see a piece of legislation [on GMO labeling] that has legs and FDA will be forced into making some kind of definition... which no one will be perfectly happy with, but a compromise has to be found. I fully understand consumers’ right to know, but there is no safety, no material difference…
“At some point, you can’t keep getting sued over label claims that don’t have a substantive bearing on the food.”
