From: ecotour@peganet.com
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2001 12:01 AM
To: fdadockets@oc.fda.gov
Cc: ecotour@peganet.com
Subject: Oppose FDA's New Regulations on Genetically Engineered Food

Roger Dykstra

Naples, FL  34119

ecotour@peganet.com


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

Dear FDA,
 
I am outraged by your new policies on genetically engineered (GE) foods. Despite overwhelming consumer demand, your agency still fails to require safety testing and mandatory labeling for GE foods. Your "notification" policy is an insult to consumers, and irresponsibly ignores strong scientific evidence of numerous potential health and environmental risks to GE foods. You should be aware that these foods could be toxic, could cause allergic responses, could have lower nutrition value, could compromise immune responses in consumers, and could cause irreparable damage to the environment. 

I am also greatly opposed to your new "voluntary labeling" policy, which denies consumers a basic right to know. Without mandatory labeling, neither consumers nor health professionals will know if an allergic or toxic reaction was the result of a genetically engineered food. Consumers will also be deprived of the critical knowledge they need to hold food producers liable should any of these novel foods prove hazardous.

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. I will not accept your attempt to make me a guinea pig of these untested foods, and I trust you will take my concern along with the thousands of others into serious consideration.

At the same time I am equally dismayed at the way you are changing the laws regarding labeling of organic foods.  Instead of encouraging this sort of farming and food production process you are diluting the major benefits of organic foods by insisting that any producer that IMPROVES upon your pitiful standards (which were dictated to you by by the AG-Industry) will not be able to call the foods organic ??

Something smells about the two issues above and it isn't sweet (nor ASPARTAME - but that's another of your failures).  Clean up your act before you find yourself at the end of an Erin Brokovich investigation.

Sincerely,



Roger Dykstra