What is Codex Alimentarus?

CODEX…HERE TO STAY?

By: Dr. James Goetz, MscD., C.S.C.S.

Thomas Jefferson once stated, “If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under tyranny.” Yet a little over two hundred years later, we find ourselves on the verge of doing just that.

CODEX Alimentarius is an attack on the worlds freedom of health and nutrition. It affects each and every individuals right to choose to be healthy by what we put in our systems.

CODEX, created in 1963, is a set of UN-created and WTO-backed standards for food and nutrition. CODEX would control how and what type of foods people can grow, sell, and eat, and what types of supplements and health choices they can make. CODEX was created in order to control every aspect of food production, packaging, preparation, preservation and presentation "from farm to mouth".

CODEX attempts to control nutritional supplements (vitamins, minerals, amino acids). It is designed to eventually expand its dominion over people's food and health choices by controlling use of herbs, homeopathic remedies, and eventually all other orally ingested substances (excluding pharmaceutical drugs).

CODEX in its completeness is intended to go into full effect on January 1, 2010, world wide. If we do nothing now, all our health freedoms will have been wiped out by that time.

A series of standards and guidelines are being readied and ratified which, one by one, are intended to remove our health rights and freedoms to choose anything but pharmaceutical medicine and poisoned foods of big agriculture (pesticide/herbicide-ridden foods and foods with genetically modified organisms).

On July 9, 2005, the US had its first major set back with CODEX as the vitamin and mineral standard was voted on and approved by Congress, whose members have no educational background in nutrition whatsoever.

Over time, domestic law here in the U.S. will be changed to bring it into alignment with CODEX standards, because of provisions in the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement which requires that member nations of the WTO shall bring their laws into conformity with CODEX's Standards.

CODEX is making other equally health-toxic decisions: Mandatory irradiation of food, mandatory treatment of all food animals with antibiotics and hormones, extremely elevated pesticide, herbicide and other toxic residue levels, etc. And all of them would be in place incrementally by January 1, 2010, with this past July 2005 being just a step in the process.

The people who stand to profit from CODEX are the "Bigs":

• Big Pharma
• Big Chema
• Big Agra
• Big Medica
• Big Biotechna

What purpose could CODEX serve to the Bigs?

By CODEX banning natural health products, individuals will become less healthy, wheras the medical field will then prescribe more drugs which will lead to increased revenues for pharmaceutical companies.

By CODEX mandating the use of pesticides, more pesticides will be used which means there will be a need for more pesticides to be manufactured which means there is increased revenues for pesticide manufacturers.

By CODEX allowing unlabeled GMO’s, there is no stop to how much GMO’s can be put into the foods we consume. With more GMO’s in the food supply, more GMO seeds will be sold to farmers which will increase the profit yield for farmers as well as increase the revenue for biotechnology companies and pesticide manufacturers who work in tandem with biotech companies.

By CODEX mandating synthetic hormones in animals, more of these hormones will be produced. This will lead to increased profits for pharmaceutical, chemical, agricultural, and biotech companies.

By CODEX mandating antibiotics in animals, more antibiotics are used in animals.

The more antibiotics used in animals, the more profits for manufacturers of antibiotics (pharmaceutical companies).

You would become one of 300 million Americans who would be on their way to losing the freedom to choose nutritional supplements, herbs, and clean food via a free market. If CODEX becomes domestic regulation and law here in the U.S. (despite the fact that CODEX has no legal standing of its own and has to be implemented by agencies and governments) innovative manufacturers would not be allowed to innovate. Small and medium sized companies would not be able to compete with the larger supplement companies who are owned by the pharmaceutical industry. Their small markets, and small-run products (many of exceptional quality and effectiveness) would no longer be available to serve the needs of their clients.

CODEX would prevent ANY claims on product labels except for the few permitted, ultra low dose supplements and prevents anyone from disseminating information about the health benefits of nutrients, including nutritionists, physicians, health food store owners, supplement manufacturers, etc.

Without being able to advertise the benefits of their products, how are these supplement and health products manufacturers going to gain the customers needed to keep their businesses in operation? And without the supplement and health products manufacturers, how are the health food stores going to be in business? What would the health food store owners sell without the manufacturers?

Not only would supplements at dosages and formulations if they have any beneficial impact on the body be forbidden by CODEX, but no one would be permitted to say anything about their health benefits, either in writing or through the spoken word. So how is it that these products and their purveyors could stay in business when the basic principles of marketing (advertising product benefits) are denied them?

Of course, this is not something CODEX-sponsors lose sleep over. This is exactly what the CODEX makers want. Bulldozing a strong and vibrant wellness industry is the whole idea. No strong and vibrant wellness industry = no natural health products = less health = more drugs = more profits for CODEX profiteers.

NNFA (Natural Nutritional Foods Association) goes beyond saying that CODEX is harmless: they insist that although it will not impact the U.S., CODEX would uphold the U.S. important (and beneficial) legal standard called Dietary Supplements Health Education Act (DSHEA, 1994) as the international standard.

Consider what has already happened in Australia. Australians were reassured by their supplement trade association that CODEX would have no effect on their access to supplements because they had the law to protect supplements. As soon as "HARMonization" with CODEX was a reality (yes, Australians have unfortunately already been hit and gone under), the law was rapidly changed to accomplish what was intended all along: nutrients and supplements became a thing of the past as the domestic law of Australia was modified to be in harmony with CODEX!

NNFA states that the coming of CODEX will be a boon for American manufacturers since it will open foreign markets now closed to U.S. supplements because our doses and potencies are higher than some countries allow. Under CODEX, those countries will not be able to keep out supplements which meet "HARMonization" requirements: ultra low doses of only a few synthetic nutrients and no others. Though there are already laws within the US that will not allow CODEX, deceptive organizations like NNFA, un-nutritionally educated members of Congress, sponsors of CODEX, and our supplement access under DSHEA and other laws would disappear.

Will NNFA be humiliated if supplement manufactures and health foods go out of business? Who can say? Unless the American people awaken to CODEX, they will probably carry on business as usual.

But I know those supplement manufacturers and health food store owners who are failing to protect themselves and the wellness industry from CODEX, will be more than humiliated when they realize that they ignored the information that would have kept them in business and their families and colleagues protected from the harm that CODEX brings. Everyone in the wellness industry should take action to protect America from CODEX, otherwise our blossoming industry won't have a bright future.

CODEX is not a treaty. It is a set of standards which are given power through enforcement under the World Trade Organization (WTO) treaty and the agreements which are part of that treaty. The problem is with the quality of the treaty: the WTO Treaty (and the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement as part of the WTO which has specific impact on the CODEX issue) is a bad treaty which violates American law and American sovereignty. One could say that it is a usurpation of our Constitution.

CODEX ALIMENTARIUS Commission (CAC) ratifies proposed standards or guidelines which are presented to it once they reach "Step 8" of the development process. Standards and guidelines are developed through the action of one of the Committees of the CAC over a period of several years. Until a standard or guideline is ratified it has no standing or impact on either international trade or national law. Once a standard or guideline is ratified, however, it is not a law but serves as the standard or reference by which international trade disputes are settled through the dispute resolution process of the World Trade Organization.

Without the coercive powers of the World Trade Organization, CODEX is just ink on paper, all 200,000 pages sitting somewhere collecting dust.

CODEX has been with us since the UN created it in 1963 and has ratified hundreds of standards (from beef to irradiation of food, from crushed apples to carcinogens like aflatoxin in milk). So CODEX itself was not passed in the July meeting in Rome. What passed is the Vitamin and Mineral Standard which has reached Step 8 and is thus ready for ratification.

CODEX guidelines can be adopted in two ways:

1. By Way of Regulation:
   Regulatory agencies like the FDA, USDA, EPA, etc., can promulgate standards and regulations which are in harmony with CODEX standards and have already done so.
2. By Way of Legislation:
   The U.S. Senate can pass legislation "harmonizing" the United States with CODEX ALIMENTARIUS. This would mean that all standards, even those yet to be promulgated, are accepted in full, in advance, by the United States. Whether this means that they would automatically become our domestic standards is the subject of a great deal of mis- (or dis-) information.

And the answer is that they indeed would automatically become our domestic standards.

Remember, treaty law trumps domestic law and CODEX ALIMENTARIUS is extending its mandate to include forcing all WTO member nations to adopt CODEX domestically through the SPSA (a WTO standard dishing out rules and regulations for how a nation should act to comply with WTO in terms of food, health, and sanitation). The WTO has the power to coerce America into CODEX-submission according to the treaty we signed when it was created in 1995 and SPSA requires that we adopt CODEX as our domestic standards as long as we remain in the WTO.

Amendments and legislation to "harmonize" us with CODEX have been introduced in Congress before (this is not a new battle). And until now, all attempts by CODEX to enter the U.S. have been beaten back by in the past by lobbyists and letters. There is also an exemption clause in effect to provide relief from international standards (USC 3512(a)(1) and (a)(2). Unfortunately these standards have not had much bearing in international law within our country. Without vigorous public grass-roots action, however, it appears we do not have the votes in the current (109th) Congress to defeat CODEX again.

Remember, once the U.S. is harmonized, we cannot be "un-harmonized" as long as we are members of the WTO. According to the WTO treaty, we cannot leave the WTO by voting ourselves out until 2010, the year that CODEX ALIMENTARIUS will go into full global implementation (1/1/2010).

CODEX Alimentarius. 1962-2005. FAO and WHO

http://www.codexalimentarius.net

World Health Organization. 27. July. 2005

http://www.who.int/foodsafety

International Portal on Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health. 23. August. 2005

http://www.ipfsaph.org

International Phytosanitary Portal. 2004

https://www.ippc.int

World Organization for Animal Health. 21. May. 2004

http://www.oie.int/eng/OIE/en_histoire.htm

World Trade Organization. 2. October. 2004

http://www.wto.org/english/info_e/search_results_e.asp

FAO. Codex Alimentarius: Supplement 1 to Volume 5B: Fresh Fruits and Vegetables.

New York: Bernan Associates, 1996.

Grassroots Action on Food and Farming.

http://www.gaff.org.uk/

Natural Health Freedom. Home Page. 2001. James, Ruth

http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/codex-alimentarius.html