From: Center for Food Safety [action@foodsafetynow.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2001 4:49 PM
To: FDA Commissioner
Cc: president@whitehouse.gov; vice.president@whitehouse.gov;
fdadockets@oc.fda.gov; fdadockets@oc.fda.gov
Subject: Oppose the New FDA Regulations on GE Foods!

FDA Commissioner 
Dockets Management Branch (HFA 305)
Food and Drug Administration
5630 Fisher's Lane, rm. 1061
Rockville, MD 20852

RE: Docket No. 00N-1396, and 00D-1598

Dear FDA,
 
I am thoroughly disappointed by your new policies on genetically engineered 
 (GE)foods. Despite overwhelming citizen demand, your agency still fails 
to require safety testing and mandatory labeling for GE foods. Your 
agency's responsibility lies with the American people, NOT the 
corporations that are interested in boosting their short-term profits 
regardless of the long-terms impacts on consumers, farmers, and the 
environment. Furthermore, your policies ignore strong scientific evidence 
of numerous potential health and environmental risks to GE foods. 

I also vigorously oppose your new “voluntary labeling” policy, which 
denies consumers a basic right to know. Without mandatory labeling, 
neither consumers nor health professionals can track the causes of 
allergic or toxic reactions that are the result of a genetically 
engineered food. Citizens will also be deprived of the critical knowledge 
they need to make informed decisions about the sources of their food -- a 
most basic human need -- and hold food producers liable should any of 
these novel foods prove hazardous to human health or the environment.

Your proposed rules ignore serious concerns, and appear to be a decision 
made to convenience industry at the expense of public health and the 
environment. There is a limit to how long the American people and 
consumers in other countries will allow large agribusiness concerns to 
dictate their food choices. Citizens and these industrial concerns will be 
better off if the appropriate policies are enacted now, proactively, 
rather than later in response to tragic effects. I trust you will take my 
concern along with the thousands of others into serious consideration.


Sincerely,
Jennifer Thorne


Jennifer Thorne
1601 Argonne Pl, NW #111
Washington, DC, 20009

CC: 
The President
Vice President Dick Cheney
FDA Dockets Management [Docket No. 00N-1396]
Delegate Eleanor Holmes NortonFDA Dockets Management [Docket No. 00D-1598]


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