Industry cries foul over ACCC chicken labelling ruling

The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC), has dismayed Australia's agbiotech community by ruling that chickens fed genetically modified grain cannot be labelled GM-free.

The ACCC's deputy chairman, Louise Sylvan, this week instructed two major chicken producers to remove GM-free labels from their products because their chickens may have eaten a feed formula containing genetically modified soybeans.

Australia's second-largest chicken producer, Bartter/Steggles, of South Australia, has been told to remove the words 'GM-free' from its labels. Baiada Poultry, based in NSW, must remove labels from trays of its Lilydale-brand free-range chicken fillets, even though they accurately state the product is not genetically modified.

The decision has alarmed Australia's peak biotechnology organisation, AusBiotech, which has referred the matter to its agricultural biotechnology advisory committee for urgent review.

AusBiotech executive director Tony Coulepis said Australia had to consider the potential repercussions of the decision for its international trade in agricultural products.

Australia's agricultural biotechnology industry was "slowly grinding to a halt" because of the collective effects of politically based decisions on GM crops and foods, he said. "The world will soon pass us by, and we will remain a commodity-based agricultural country," Coulepis said.

He said the ACCC should base its decisions on scientific evidence, not "knee-jerk" responses to consumer perceptions. It should have taken account of the fact that other nations -- even in Europe -- tolerated the widespread practice of feeding livestock GM grain, without requiring the end products to be labelled as containing GM.

Since last Christmas anti-GM activists, led by Greenpeace Australia Pacific, have campaigned to pressure Australia's biggest poultry producer, Inghams, to drop imported GM grain from its feed formulas. The ACCC's ruling does not affect Inghams, which does not label its chickens as being GM-free.

Sylvan said the Australian Consumers' Association, which brought the case against Bartter/Steggles and Baiada, had presented evidence that consumers were buying the companies' products because they believed the end product had nothing to do with genetic modification.

Because the chickens may have been fed on GM soy, the companies' labelling was potentially misleading to consumers.

The two companies had sought a marketing advantage by claiming their chickens were GM-free, when there was no such thing as GM chicken.

Sylvan said while the chickens were not genetically modified, the issue was the context of the labelling. "Consumers may well have taken the labels to mean that the whole process of raising chickens was GM-free," she said.

"When someone makes a 'free' claim, it had better be free. Consumers are no experts -- what matters is what they take from the label."

But a leading defender of GM agriculture, Prof Rick Roush, of the University of California, Davis, criticised the ACCC ruling.

"One has to ask if consumers are well served by eliminating an accurate label because some consumers believe wrongly that eating GM makes an animal GM," said Roush, a former director of the Australian Weeds Cooperative Research Centre in Adelaide. "Whose understanding is improved by a regulatory action that caters to ignorance?"

Roush said the Australian Consumers Association was "no friend of biotechnology".

His successor at the Weeds CRC, Dr Chris Preston, described the decision as "a little strange".

"Although I can see where [Sylvan] is coming from, there's no way that feeding GM plant material to a chick will make the chicken GM," Preston said.

He also noted that there was a potential conflict of interest in the ACCC decision because Sylvan was executive director of the Australian Consumers Association prior to her appointment. In January last year, when Greenpeace and the Australian GeneEthics Network were campaigning to block a shipment of unsegregated GM maize destined to be used in livestock feed in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Sylvan as saying, "Even if there is no GM residue in resulting human food, consumers have a right to know GM ingredients were used in food production and this is not provided for by Australia's labelling laws".

Preston said the ACCC decision appeared to extend the definition of 'GM-free' to include the entire production chain leading up to the final food product.

"It could be taken to ridiculous lengths," he said. "For example, what happens if you feed chickens on conventional crop from a field where a GM crop had been grown in the previous season?

He said claims made on food labels needed to be demonstrable -- to measure something.

One company -- Baiada -- had accurately labelled its chicken fillets as 'not genetically modified', so the ACCC's decision requiring the company to remove it was also potentially misleading to consumers.

University of Melbourne microbiologist Dr David Tribe said that while the two companies may have been seeking an unfair marketing advantage by labelling their products 'GM-free', the ACCC had been wrong to require the removal of labels that communicated technically accurate advice to consumers.

"Two wrongs don't make a right," Tribe said.