Industry Insensitivity to Health Drives Codex Agenda

By Scott C. Tips

President of the National Health Federation

The hazy, smoggy skies over Beijing during these March days are emblematic of the Codex meetings that the National Health Federation (NHF) has been attending for many days here in China. The Sun only shimmers as a strange, pale orange globe, casting an ethereal, almost futuristic "Bladerunner" look to the cityscape while city residents glide silently past with white face masks and we Codex delegates and staff work inside overheated rooms on international food-additive standards. Given what has transpired, the setting seems apt.

Throughout the week of March 18-22, 2013, the Codex Committee on Food Additives (CCFA) met at the Asia Hotel in Beijing, China, chaired by Dr. Junshi Chen of the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment, to consider hundreds of food additives, some of which are innocuous, even healthful, others of which are most decidedly toxic. The problem is that many of the Codex delegates cannot discern the difference between the two, the haziness of their thinking working in some sort of bizarre parallel to the opaque weather outdoors.

As the only consumer group present at this meeting, and the working group that preceded it, the NHF offered a unique perspective on what its members consider healthful and what it does not. To us, aluminum-containing food additives and aspartame are self-evidently toxic and should be removed from the food supply. However, to the trade organizations here, and their foot servants in too many of the regulatory agencies that sit in as the country-member Codex delegates here, such food additives are simply vehicles of manufacturing convenience and health be damned. In fact, I rather suspect that had these same businesses been manufacturing leaden drinking vessels during the heyday of the Roman Empire, then they would have similarly defended such vessels' use as vital and indispensable tools of commerce, no matter that the users were slowly being poisoned by the deadly, leaching lead.

©2012 Scott C. Tips

                Do you remember when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) were proposed and passed?  (Well, CAFTA didn't really pass, except through legislative trickery.)  Promises were made about the abundant benefits that would fall into the laps of its signatories, but especially into the lap of the United States.  None of those promises were ever kept, except to the large corporations in partnership with their government concubines. 

                And "Free Trade" as a name in those agreements' titles?  That was a misnomer if there ever was one.  Those incredibly lengthy documents were all about "Managed Trade" and not the free market.  If they had truly been about free trade, then it would have taken one-page, maybe two (for the signatures) to set forth the parties' agreement: "All tariffs and trade barriers between and among the signatory parties are hereby eliminated."  So, the Agreements are nothing but a costly joke and a way to usher into our lives a soul-numbing harmonization that already is reducing our freedoms into dim memories and pat slogans of patriotism.

                 Now arrives yet another insult to our freedoms – the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which some are already describing as "NAFTA on steroids."  The TPP, as it is called, is a very-secretive, multi-national trade agreement currently being negotiated among eleven different Pacific-Rim countries and pushed by both Republicans and Democrats.  In its fourteenth round of negotiations – which just finished in Leesburg, Virginia, as you read these words – the parties hope to make wide-ranging changes to all parties' laws, rules, and regulations. (See http://www.ustr.gov/tpp)

Scott Tips discusses NRVs with Malaysian and Benin delegates at CCNFSDU Meeting

In a stunning display of nutritional ignorance, three women ram through a Codex standard that leaves many with sub-optimal nutrition

The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) just finished meeting all last week (December 3-7) in Bad Soden, a small German city near Frankfurt am Main. Nearly 300 delegates were in attendance, comprised of government functionaries and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) representatives.  So, for one week, the assembled delegates – including the INGO delegation of the National Health Federation (NHF)[1] –met, discussed, and debated a wide number of food and food-supplement issues, including the controversial draft Nutrient Reference Values (NRVs) for vitamins and minerals.

Remember, the food guidelines and standards adopted by this Committee, and approved by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, are important because they are then used domestically  by numerous countries worldwide and by virtually all countries in international food trade.