Sir

Colin Macilwain's News story about the US Food and Drug Administration ‘reforms’ in the supervision of genetically modified food (Nature 405, 108; 2000) tells only part of the story.

Not only did the announcement “not include any mandatory requirement for the labelling of GM foods” — it did not include any requirement for pre-marketing scientific assessment by the government either.

As a result, we have no real supervision of the industry here. All the FDA did was to make mandatory the ‘consultations’ which had previously been optional (not a tough demand, since in every case so far, the companies had met FDA officials voluntarily anyway).

The information that is to be placed on the FDA's website will be highly censored, because the United States enforces strict rules protecting proprietary business information. This outweighs any notion of the public's right to know what we are putting in our bodies.

The agency's plan to develop guidelines for voluntary labelling is nice but unnecessary, because our First Amendment guarantees that, as long as a statement is truthful, we don't really need government permission to say it.

This is an exercise in how to tread water and make it appear that you are swimming.