The GMO Labeling Dark Act Has Passed, Now It’s Time for the Lawsuit to Stop It
On July 29, the DARK Act went into effect as President Obama quietly signed the bill despite hundreds of thousands of us asking him not to. This means the GMO labeling many of us across the country have seen on products could soon disappear.
But the fight doesn’t end here. The Center for Food Safety will be filing a federal lawsuit in the next two weeks asking a court to declare the law unconstitutional on a number of grounds and to restore our democratically decided upon labeling laws.
This will be a major battle to defend the rights of consumers and farmers to choose to avoid GMO foods and seeds. Once again, CFS’s legal and science team will be taking on the world’s most powerful industrial food and chemical corporations and their highly paid lawyers.
The Center for Food Safety is used to waging successful legal battles against powerful forces. As a result of past CFS litigation and other efforts, they have stopped numerous GMO crops from being introduced and commercialized; defended county GMO crop bans; banned GMOs from all National Wildlife Refuges in the U.S.; and many other victories protecting our food, our health, and our environment.
They know how to win, but they can’t do this alone. Help the CFS continue the fight in court by pitching in $5 right now.
As we know, the DARK Act is a legislative train wreck. It preempts the GMO labeling laws of Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut, as well as seed and GMO fish labeling laws. In place of these laws, the bill gives the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) two years to establish standards for GMO labeling allowing companies and producers to use “digital” labeling (a.k.a QR codes) and 1-800 numbers to label food products that contain GMOs.
The idea that consumers would have to call or use their phones on each and every product they buy is absurd. And since more than 100 million Americans, mostly the rural elderly and low income, do not even own smartphones, they will not even have access to the digital labeling the law promotes. What’s worse, the law’s narrow definition would exclude many, and perhaps most, current foods containing GMO ingredients from any form of labeling.
CFS has no intention of letting this anti-democratic, discriminatory, fake labeling bill stand. But in all of their battles to defend our democratic rights and protect farmers and communities, they perform all of their legal work free of charge. In these lawsuits, CFS in-house attorneys and scientists spend many thousands of hours arguing these cases all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Private law firms would charge many millions of dollars for this amount of legal work and expertise. Even working on public interest salaries, these cases cost CFS hundreds of thousands of dollars in work and expenses.
We know this is a fight worth fighting, and they need our help.
Photo by karen_neoh 
