I will speak very briefly. I have added my name to Amendment 62 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, and my noble friend Lady Parminter has spoken to Amendment 61. Both noble Baronesses have made very powerful points.
Both amendments deal with labelling, a critical component of ensuring the acceptance of precision-engineered food by the public. It is the public at the end of the day that will make the decision about this. The Food Standards Agency in its recent briefing felt that labelling was not necessary, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has said, as the food produced by natural processes would be completely indistinguishable from that which has been precision engineered, and the labelling would be cumbersome and the labels too cluttered. Obviously, I disagree with that.
The consumer has become used to reading labels to see what the allergen content is, what the calories are and how much salt and fat are contained in the
product—so why not whether the product contains precision-bred ingredients? We heard earlier from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, that the FSA is under pressure and underfunded. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, set out her amendment clearly, and it is obvious what the rationale is. At some stage, the Government will carry out a review of how the actions permitted in this Bill are progressing, and what the advantages and disadvantages have been. I hope that it will all be positive. However, if there is no clear labelling, the process of review will be deeply flawed, if not impossible to carry out.
The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred to loose potatoes being labelled and that being very difficult—and I have to say that it will be exactly the same as they are at the moment. In the shops, it will say, perhaps, “Arran Pilot” or “Estima”, and underneath it may say, “Contains genetically modified organisms”. It is not difficult for loose produce to be labelled. All precision-bred organisms and food and feed, and the progeny from those organisms, should be labelled from the start of the process, not at some later date in future.