|
No Consensus Reached on Creation of Parmesan Standard At the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) meeting in Rome, Italy, earlier this month, the CAC failed to reach consensus on moving forward with a global standard for Parmesan cheese. However, the CAC did agree to hold the issue for possible future consideration by any member-country at the next meeting of either the CAC or the underlying Codex Committee on Milk and Milk Products.IDFA Senior Vice President Clay Hough, who attended the meeting as a member of the official U.S. delegation, said debate on the controversial Parmesan topic lasted more than five hours over two days, with dozens of countries speaking to the issue. "While the result was disappointing — especially given the hard work by IDFA staff before and during the meeting — the work and dedication of the U.S. government members of the delegation on trying to win this issue was truly inspirational," Hough said. "In this regard, special appreciation is due to Duane Spomer and Susan Sausville of USDA, who worked exceptionally hard on this issue over the last two years." Opposition was presented by the European Community (EC), speaking as a block of 23 countries, which argued that a global standard for Parmesan could be used as evidence to attack the Parmigiano-Reggiano protected designation of origin in the European Union market. In the end, the intractable opposition of the EC prevented a consensus from being reached on moving a Parmesan cheese standard forward. IDFA's interests found a more positive outcome on work concerning a draft standard for Quantitative Declaration of Ingredients (QUID) on labels. IDFA opposes QUID, which would require that labels include the specific amount of an ingredient, as opposed to listing the ingredients by order of predominance (which is current U.S. regulation). The U.S. delegation successfully argued that since there was no consensus to move the draft QUID standard forward to Step 5, it should be returned to Step 3. (There are eight steps in the Codex procedure.) The CAC is jointly supported by two United Nations organizations: the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization. The CAC is charged with protecting public health through the promulgation and harmonization of food standards and hygienic processing practices, and promoting fair practices in food trade. The CAC culture is to operate as a consensus organization, with movement on any standard only possible with general agreement among the approximately 170 member countries. For more information, contact the IDFA regulatory group at 202/737-4332.
Posted July 18, 2005
|
