The Lake County Chamber’s recent call for “caution” regarding Proposition 37 ( Fulton and Magliulo: Food labeling – a cautionary approach ) is completely off-target.

The FDA does not test GE foods for safety – they rely strictly upon the testing that the companies choose to do and merely “evaluate” the carefully selected information that the companies choose to submit regarding the results of safety testing.

FDA whistle-blowers have been complaining for years that it’s more like a rubber stamp process and that evidence of harmful effects has been routinely covered up or ignored.

The FDA requires no long-term safety studies and none are done by the companies requesting approvals. After all, they want to get their product onto the market as quickly as possible, let’s not let caution get in the way of profits!

The FDA believes that GE foods are safe until they are found to be harmful. That means that instead of actually being cautious, doing independent research that will really show whether these product s are safe, caution has been thrown to the wind and all of us are the biotech industry’s unwitting experimental subjects.

When Proposition 37 passes, the law allows manufacturers to add the information about GE ingredients when they make other routine changes to listed ingredients on their labels.

So as far as the hair-on-fire claims that this will make food unaffordable and the poor will starve, anyone who reads labels knows that food producers reprint and redesign labels regularly, and changes to ingredients and formulations occur fairly regularly.

Complaints that the law doesn’t cover this or that are intentional distractions from the real issue, the right to know.

The law was intentionally designed to have a limited scope. This is a good thing! In fact, if the exemptions didn’t exist, the same parties who are complaining about them now would be complaining that there are no exceptions and how that’s unfair to this or that food industry or agricultural sector.

The argument that shoppers should just buy Certified Organic products if they want to avoid GE food is also defective. Many times there is no organic version of a product available, yet there may be a conventionally-produced product with no GE ingredients sitting next to a similar item that contains GE ingredients.

With labeling we’d have that information, and more than 90 percent of consumers believe that we should have that knowledge available to us when we buy groceries.

The only opponents to labeling are those who profit from GE products and their promoters in the FDA and USDA.

Those big players in the national chamber are telling the local chamber to get with the program. Ironically, these biotech insiders in the national chamber are accustomed to tax subsidies and preferential treatment by regulatory agencies – they don’t want a fair free market full of buyers who have the same information as sellers – they don’t really believe that a truly the free market will work out for them!

The issue of labeling and choice is not complex at all. It’s obvious that we Americans have the same right to know what we are eating as the citizens of the European countries, Japan, Malaysia and Australia.

Is the chamber really telling us that it’s so complicated and difficult for us ordinary American shoppers, voters and taxpayers to comprehend, that we should NOT be entitled to the same rights as the British or French people? That we should reject the right to know what we are eating and just listen to the experts who know best at the FDA?

Executive Committee of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, are you serious? I’m pretty sure that most of your local members would not want to argue that we Americans should have fewer rights than people in Europe or Malaysia.

Roberta Actor-Thomas is a software consultant in Lakeport.