Mary Upton (Dublin South Central, Labour)
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Question 202: To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Children if her attention has been drawn to concerns expressed by the Food Safety Authority that some food companies are misleading the public by falsely claiming that their products are free of genetically modified ingredients; if she will consider the introduction of stricter guidelines regarding labelling; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [26447/05]

Seán Power (Kildare South, Fianna Fail)
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The Food Safety Authority of Ireland, FSAI, is the competent authority in Ireland for the enforcement of EU legislation regarding genetically modified, GM, foods. It carries out checks of the marketplace for compliance with the GM legislation. Under the EU GM food and feed regulation, only authorised GM foods, or foods containing ingredients thereof, can be placed on the market. New legislation, which came into force in 2004, stipulates that persons wishing to place GM foods on the market must provide material and information to enable testing for specific GM organisms, GMOs, before they may be authorised for marketing. The GM labelling threshold provided for in the regulation requires that a food or ingredient be labelled if it has a GM content of more than 0.9%. This labelling threshold is intended to cater for adventitious contamination that may occur as a result of mixing during production, processing, storage or transport.

The FSAI has carried out a number of surveys of the food supply chain in recent years and has employed both the State Laboratory as well as a private laboratory to carry out testing of the genetic material — DNA — in a range of foods using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, PCR. One of the uses of this highly sensitive technique is to allow for the testing for the presence, and sometimes the amount, of a GMO present in a food. The EU Joint Research Centre, based in Ispra in Italy, has undertaken to standardise how GMOs and derived food and feed are tested using PCR, and a number of tests have already been developed.

The FSAI's recently published report concentrated on its surveillance of foods carrying GM-free labels as this type of label had been identified as a potential problem in previous surveys. Terms such as "non-GM" and "GM-free" are not defined by EU or national legislation and thus are subject to the general food labelling directive which stipulates that labels should not mislead the purchaser. Therefore, a food labelled to indicate that no GM ingredients are present may not contain any level of GM ingredients.

The results show that a small number of products with GM-free labels contained low levels of GM ingredients. In addition, a number of foods with GM-free labels had no ingredients that could be from a GM source meaning that such labels in those cases were merely a marketing tool rather than for consumer information. The FSAI is following up on this matter with the companies concerned. The FSAI has requested that retailers remove all batches of foods carrying GM free type labels identified in survey as containing GM ingredients.

In the best interests of the consumer, food business operators are warned that the FSAI will continue to test foods with GM-free-type labels and that legal proceedings will be considered where products bearing GM-free-type labels are found to contain any level of GM ingredients.