Why Codex Should Matter to You

Why Codex Should Matter to You

by John Hathcock, Ph.D.

If youve been standing on the sidelines, the Codex Alimentarius may seem to be nothing more than a group of food regulators slowly chewing on regulations a few times a year in exotic locations. But those of us who have been in the ballgame for a long time are well aware of the far-reaching influence that Codex Alimentarius and its decision-making body, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, have on our industry.

Literally translated as food code in English, the Codex Alimentarius is the most authoritative international set of food standards. Set up as a joint program of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1960, Codex may move slowly, but make no mistakeit eventually has a huge impact on the issues it addresses. And those issues can have a huge impact on a companys business.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) recognizes Codex as one of three international standard-setting bodies for food safety, thereby providing Codex documents the presumption of being the controlling standard in trade disputes, imposing obligations on importing and exporting countries.

At the end of June, the Commission met in Rome, and several U.S. interests fared poorly. Specifically, a European was elected as the next chairman of the Commission, while the United States had supported a candidate from Chile. The American candidate running for one of three new vice chairman positions was defeated, losing out to candidates from Canada, Japan and Tanzania.

There was also a failure to require greater clarity about the membership and participation of regional economic integration organizations in Codex. As written, this change to the Procedural Manual would permit a collective vote by the European Union but would virtually preclude similar participation by any other organization that might be created.

Industry claimed a small victory by getting the health claims document pushed a couple of steps back in the approval process. This will require further discussion of the document, which CRN basically supports except for its recently expanded scope that includes advertising.

Codex standards and guidelines are adopted by a tedious eight-step consensus procedure that often takes many years. Consequently, there is ongoing opportunity to affect the process, if one is familiar with it and stays in tune along the way. CRN maintains the importance of industry participation and a vigilant involvement in the process.

How Codex Works

The Codex Alimentarius Commissions handbook explicitly states that Codex standards and guidelines have two aims: protecting consumer health (through a better supply of safer and more nutritious food) and ensuring fair practices in food trade. Participation in Codex meetings is limited to the delegations of member nations, recognized intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Only national delegations may vote. CRN and the International Alliance of Dietary/Food Supplement Associations (IADSA) are the only supplement organizations that have gained official NGO status at Codex.

The Commission has set up a large number of committees to do the basic work, but no committee documents or recommendations have any official status until the Commission adopts them. In the four decades since the inception of Codex, the Commission has adopted a large number of standards (numerical values for some aspect of specific foods relating to safety and nutritional values) and guidelines for procedures and methods.

Each Codex committee is hosted by a specific country, which provides a secretariat and chairman for that committee. Over a series of meetings, these roles often allow that country to have major impacts on the committees decisions, but the Commission has sometimes reversed those decisions. Codex prefers to work through consensus, but a member country can call for a vote on specific issues.

Impact on the Dietary Supplement Industry

For the supplement industry, three Codex committees are critically important:

• The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses has been working for many years on proposed draft guidelines for vitamin and mineral supplements. The large stumbling block in the way of consensus is the choice of whether upper limits should be RDA-based or based on safety as evaluated by risk assessment.
• The Codex Committee on Food Labeling has made much progress on a proposal for health claims on the labeling of any foods, including dietary supplements.
• The Codex Committee on General Principles considers a wide range of structural and procedural issues, the most important for the supplement industry being the proposed draft guidelines on risk analysis. European countries, individually and collectively through the European Commissions (EC) role as an IGO, have made a sustained effort to gain recognition of their precautionary principle, which would diminish the role of science and increase the political impact on food safety decisions.

The precautionary principle is just one example of how industry can make an impact on Codex issues. With industry NGOs, including CRN and IADSA, urging cooperative national delegations, the General Principles committee again refused to incorporate the precautionary principle in its risk analysis draft document during its April 2003 meeting. When the nutrition and foods committee meets in November to again consider its proposed draft guidelines on vitamin and mineral supplements, industry NGOs will be there to urge the national delegations to carry forward our viewpoints. CRN will continue to promote the adoption of maximums based on genuine safety considerations identified by nutrient-appropriate risk assessment.

The recognition by WTO guarantees the importance of Codex standards and guidelines. This recognition and worldwide scope of application trumps regional authorities, such as the EC, and would serve as the arbitrating standard in bilateral trade disputes. Codex is simply too large and powerful to be ignored. There is no doubt that the outcomes are more likely to be acceptable if our industry stays involved.

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