My Lords, I can assure noble Lords that this is not some sort of Cross-Bench conspiracy, but I am afraid to say that, although I can see the arguments, I too do not support the idea of labelling precision-bred products.
I have three principal arguments, some of which have been touched on, but I will nevertheless repeat them. The first is to do with enforceability. As we have heard, and indeed my noble friend Lord Cameron said a few moments ago, there is no chemical test that can distinguish between a precision-bred organism, whether it is a plant or an animal, and one that is produced by conventional breeding. So trading standards officers or public analysts would not be able to do what they would normally expect to do: take a product off the shelf and subject it to a chemical test to justify or assess its authenticity.
We have heard quite a bit about traceability and my noble friend Lord Cameron pointed to some of the difficulties with traceability in the livestock industry. But also, it is important to remember that in the food industry traceability works on a one up, one down principle. That is to say, you are buying a raw material to put in a product and you check that the person who is selling you the raw material claims that it is what it is on the tin. But that chain can often be very long. You are buying grain that has been produced in Argentina and there is a long supply chain from the farmer to the transport to the dock to the transport in the ship to Liverpool; the cargo is unloaded in Liverpool and then it is transferred through many stages before it finally ends up in the Warburtons bread factory. The one up, one down system is by no means fool-proof—which is why to really check what something is, you need to have an analytical test to back it up. A regulation that is unenforceable is a bad regulation.
Secondly, what are consumers supposed to do with the information? Of course, if you ask consumers whether they want to have precision breeding on the label, they will say yes. I know from my time at the Food Standards Agency that almost whatever you ask people about they will say “Yes, we’d love to have it on the label”. But you also have to remember that other surveys show that only between one-quarter and one-third of consumers ever read the label. So many people who say they want it on the label do not actually look at it. If it is supposed to allow people who are worried about technology to avoid PBOs, as my noble friend Lord Cameron has said, why not label products which have been produced as a result of mutagenesis with ionising radiation or chemical toxins?
I can, however—and perhaps this speaks to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock raised—have reason to label the effects of a PBO. For example, if precision-breeding were used to create tomatoes with more lycopene, if no fungicides were used in growing potatoes, or broccoli had more omega-3, there would be a reason to label those, because it would affect the way in which the consumer might wish to use the product. But those benefits do not need mandatory labelling because producers and retailers will do it anyway. You can buy eggs in the supermarket labelled as containing enhanced omega-3. Similarly, standards such as organic foods, Freedom Foods and Rainforest Alliance foods are labelled without the need for regulation because there is a marketing advantage.
Labels are already overcomplex. Although, as I say, people will always ask for more, cluttering up labels with more information will make it more difficult for those who have to read the labels for crucial information
—for example, to avoid allergens. If you add extra labelling, you are just making it more difficult for people to read the crucial things.
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The US Food and Drug Administration has the principle that information should be mandatory on a label only when it affects how the consumer wants to use the product. Since labelling a PBO, as my noble friend Lord Cameron said, does not affect the nature of the final product, it is hard to see how it can affect the way in which the consumer uses it.
My third and final point is about the practicality of labelling unpackaged fruit and vegetables. If the label has to be on the package, how would one label potatoes sold loose? To take another example from the plant side, equivalent to that referred to by my noble friend Lord Cameron, let us say a tomato sauce is made from raw materials from many sources; what does the label say? Some of the sources may be precision-bred tomatoes, but the majority may not. Is it another case of “may contain”, which is not a very helpful label?
So, although I can see the arguments, I am afraid I do not support these amendments and I do not think they are practical—and, incidentally, I do not think the Food Standards Agency supports them either.