Codex Chairman Seeks to Thwart Pro Health Initiative
"Codex' restrictive "Vitamin and Mineral Guideline" treats nutrients as toxins to be regulated on the basis of "risk analysis" without regard for benefit. Incredibly, a US dominated* WHO Workshop on the Application of Risk Assessment to Nutrients expanded the concept from Vitamins and Minerals to all nutrients and offered further guidance which defines an adverse event related to any nutrient as "any change in a bio marker". This means that any nutrient which produces any change, no matter how beneficial, will be a prohibited substance for international trade. At the same time, nations are being advised to adopt the alleged "science based" Codex Guidelines as their own domestic legislation in a process called "harmonization". Based on poor science, many of these Guidelines guarantee poor nutritional status and preventable ill health for billions of people, starting with the most nutritionally vulnerable."
"Clinically ineffective level of nutrients which are treated as if they are toxins, highly profitable but dangerously high levels of pesticides and antibiotics, mandatory contamination of the global food supply by procedures such as irradiation and treatment of food animals (including dairy cattle) with growth/sex hormones, Genetically Modified foods, significant weakening of Organic Food standards and other decisions taken by Codex over the years are of grave concern to consumers and health advocates..."
"diseases identified by the WHO as the chronic degenerative diseases of under nutrition: cancers, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity which, in fact, are responsible for 59% of the world's disease burden now and are expected to increase that percentage sharply as Codex provisions are implemented world-wide."
This in a nutshell sums up the CODEX deliberations and the following shows the typical politics at play and is a good primer to most who are struggling to get a handle on this.
Chris Gupta*Codex: FDA "Vetoes" Optimal Nutrition for Health
See also: LIFE UNDER CODEX (a bit dated but still provides a good summary)
------------------------------------July 5, 2006
Codex Chairman Seeks to Thwart Natural Solutions Foundation Pro Health Codex Initiative
Natural Solutions Foundation must be doing something right because the Chairman of the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC or "Codex") took direct action last week to stop the Foundation's pro-health initiative next week's Geneva Codex meeting.
Geneva (PRWEB) July 5, 2006 -- In an unprecedented move, CAC's Chairman Moshe sent a letter to the head of a national department in an African country to prevent the Natural Solutions Foundation from offering official sponsorship to a pro-health scientist so that he could attend Codex as part of that country's delegation. The Natural Solutions Foundation's pro-health multi-national strategy is apparently a significant threat to the underlying corporate agenda(s) of CAC. The national delegate, who has previously represented his country at numerous Codex meetings, was prevented from attending this year's meeting by the direct intervention of the power structure of CAC this week when the CAC Chair wrote a sharp letter opposing his attendance at the meeting. The delegate's country complied with the Chair's demand so the delegate was prevented from attending as part of the National Solutions Foundation international pro-health consortium participating in the CAC deliberations scheduled to take place here in Geneva next week (July 3-7, 2006). Political strategists and Natural Solutions Foundation analysts interpret this move on the part of the CAC as confirming the centrality of the pro-illness agenda of CAC.
Codex, the world's food standard setting body, is a special project of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) convened at the request of the United Nations in 1962. Codex is strongly influenced by multinational corporations whose profit structure depend on large scale agriculture ("Agribiz"), pesticides and other industrial chemicals in the food supply, veterinary drugs and growth stimulants ("Big Chema"), biotechnology ("Big Biotechna") or wide spread illness ("Big Pharma" and "Big Medica"). Leading health advocacy organizations like the Natural Solutions Foundation see Codex policies as relying heavily on corrupt "corporate" science. Codex policy appears to be strongly opposed to, rather than supportive of, optimal health.
In his highly irregular move, CAC Chairman Moshe directly intervened to block the participation of a strongly pro-health scientist with extensive Codex experience in this year's annual CAC meeting. The scientist, whose Natural Solutions Foundation-sponsored participation had been approved by the head of his national agency, is a well-known and outspoken voice for health, optimum nutrition and environmental concerns. At stake this year is a dramatic change of direction for CAC: the implementation of the World Health Organization Global Strategy for Diet, Physical Activity and Health (GSDPAH) which was demanded of CAC by both of its parent organizations at the close of the 2005 CAC meeting (Rome, 2005).
Of major significance is a the development of a strong multi-national pro-health lobby at CAC which can support 11 strongly pro-health principles for GSDPAH implementation introduced during discussion of the topic at the Codex Committee on Food Labeling by South Africa (May 1-5, 2006, Ottawa). If adopted and employed by CAC at its meeting this year, South Africa's 11 principles can accomplish what individual pro-health voices within CAC have not been able to during more than years: bringing optimal health forward as a Codex goal.
The Natural Solutions Foundation strongly supports the adoption of the South African principles for the implementation of the GSDPAH by CAC. Since they focus on
*Optimal health (explicitly opposed by the United States as a goal for CAC (CCFL, May 1, Ottawa, 2006))
*Access to nutritional supplements to enhance health
*Definition of dietary supplements as important tools for optimal health, not toxins
*Elimination of commercial trans fats
*Banning of junk food advertising which targets children under 18 (also explicitly opposed by the United States(CCFL, May 1, Ottawa, 2006)) and other strong public health measures, these principles are of great importance to consumers. At the same time, they pose a significant threat to those corporate interests which profit from contamination of the food supply and from widespread preventable, but highly profitable, illness. The GSDPAH was adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2004 and, as such, is morally incumbent upon every member nation of the World Health Organization (which includes most of the members of Codex).
The subject of the GSDPAH was introduced at the CAC last July (Rome, 2005) after several attempts by WHO and FAO to focus CAC on what Dr. Kirsten Leitner of WHO identified as CAC's failure to "make a contribution to human health in the [then 42 years of its existence" were rebuffed by last year's CAC Chair, Dr. A. Slorach.
Dr. Leitner's statement [subsequently edited from the publicly available video and audio record of the July 4-9, 2005 CAC Rome meeting was followed by several other attempts to direct CAC's attention to health promotion. On the last day of the meeting, WHO and FAO jointly directed CAC to implement the GSDPAH. CAC was directed to determine the nature of that implementation through discussions on how that should take place by two Codex Committees during the year leading up to the Geneva, 2006 CAC meeting this week (July 3-7, 2006).
Although the Codex Committee of Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU, Bonn, November 21-25, 2005) failed to move the discussion forward because inadequate time was allotted for the discussion, the Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL, Ottawa, 2006) did make progress with the introduction of South Africa's 11 principles.
In support of these strongly pro-health principles, the Natural Solutions Foundation, has conducted an international mission and visited high level decision makers and consumer advocates in Africa and elsewhere. Foundation President Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army, Ret.) and Medical Director Rima E. Laibow, MD have spent many weeks meeting with decision makers at the top levels of government in many countries to explain the importance of supporting the South African position as a means of shifting CAC's function and mandate away from corporate benefits and preventable diseases of under nutrition toward consumer health and freedom of health choices. During these visits, the legal options available to each country to protect its people from health threats supported by CAC (e.g., dangerously high pesticide levels, treating nutrients as toxins, mandated under-nutrition, dangerous growth stimulants, mandatory antibiotic and hormone use as well as other dangerous veterinary drug residues, etc.) while protecting the country itself from crushing World Trade Organization (WTO) trade sanctions if that country takes a stance divergent from CAC's on these issues has been a topic of vigorous and productive discussion. Natural Solutions Foundation documents and information has been enthusiastically received by legislators, Ministers of Health, National Consumer Advocates and others in the countries where the most nutritionally vulnerable people in the world live. Their nutritional vulnerability makes them especially vulnerable to the diseases identified by the WHO as the chronic degenerative diseases of under nutrition: cancers, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity which, in fact, are responsible for 59% of the world's disease burden now and are expected to increase that percentage sharply as Codex provisions are implemented world-wide.
Natural Solutions Foundation's international activities have helped to create a growing and increasingly vocal multi-national constituency for health rather than corporate interests within Codex: it has been successfully mobilizing an international pro-health coalition of countries whose policies are not yet set by the multinational corporations whose agenda it believes is being served by Codex to the severe detriment of the health and health freedom of the global population. One of the tools the foundation uses is delegate sponsorship at Codex.
Sponsorship of delegates is permitted within the CAC context and is common among corporations. Sponsored delegates represent their countries but are heavily influenced by the positions of their sponsors. Nestle, a major baby food and formula producer, for example, frequently sponsors delegates to the influential Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU). Using a "sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander" philosophy, the Natural Solutions Foundation offers sponsorship to delegates from countries whose national policies are pro-health but whose resources for participation in CAC are limited. Such sponsorship allows national delegations to attend and focus on strong support for health and opposition to health-hostile corporate agendas based upon junk science.
Natural Solutions Foundation, dedicated to the twin concepts that good health rests on a solid foundation of access to a clean, unadulterated food supply including high potency nutrients and that it is the right of every consumer to choose natural health options if they desire, has pursued several strategies to promote world health and end world hunger in the US and elsewhere. These include a legal challenge to US Codex policy concerning dietary supplements (the Codex Citizen's Petition), an informational DVD (Nutricide: the DVD), a Codex eBook, documenting the protective strategy any country can take against Codex errors as applied to the destructive and restrictive Vitamin and Mineral Guideline and multiple international missions to meet with national decision-makers in the world's most nutritionally vulnerable countries to urge careful consideration of health policies which are protective, unlike most of those urged by the supposedly "science based" Codex guidelines and standards.
For example, Codex' restrictive "Vitamin and Mineral Guideline" treats nutrients as toxins to be regulated on the basis of "risk analysis" without regard for benefit. Incredibly, a US dominated WHO Workshop on the Application of Risk Assessment to Nutrients expanded the concept from Vitamins and Minerals to all nutrients and offered further guidance which defines an adverse event related to any nutrient as "any change in a bio marker". This means that any nutrient which produces any change, no matter how beneficial, will be a prohibited substance for international trade. At the same time, nations are being advised to adopt the alleged "science based" Codex Guidelines as their own domestic legislation in a process called "harmonization". Based on poor science, many of these Guidelines guarantee poor nutritional status and preventable ill health for billions of people, starting with the most nutritionally vulnerable. By studying the legal and procedural levels of Codex and the World Trade Organization, the Natural Solutions Foundation and its allies have devised a strategy for national correction of health-hostile actions taken by Codex and revision of health-hostile Guidelines by individual nations, including the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline.
The Natural Solutions Foundation, in cooperation with it allies in the Health Freedom movement (e.g., the Citizen's Codex Working Group) believes that most of the Codex actions are supportive of corporate well-being, but highly threatening to consumer health and choice. To protect health and health freedom, the Natural Solutions Foundation therefore pursues grass roots development, leadership education and strategic support of countries and groups wishing to support consumer health and health freedom.
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July 5, 2006
World Food Standard Setting Body Fails to Give Diet Its Due
Codex Aliementarius Commission at its 29th Session in Geneva failed to move the vitally important, consumer protective "Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health" (GS) from last item on agenda. Following the precedent of the nutrition hostile Codex Committee on Nutrition and Food for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU, Bonn, Germany) last November, where discussion of how to implement GS was moved from item 2 to item 11 on the agenda so that no time remained for discussion, Codex, the world food standards body (which treats nutrients as if they were toxins)placed this consumer-friendly discussion last. None of the 180+ members chose to protect consumer's health by insuring adequate time for discussion of how to protect their well-being by implementing the GS. Codex meetings end promptly on schedule, a fact relied upon by Dr. Rolf Grossklaus, the CCNFSDU Chair who recently stated that "nutrition has no place in medicine (CCNFSDU, 2003).
Geneva, Switzerland (PRWEB) July 5, 2006 -- The world's food standards setting body is divided by a deepening conflict over the importance of protecting consumer's health and health freedoms vs. the importance of trade considerations and multinational corporate health. Although the disconnect between these agendas has been brewing since the founding of the Codex Alimentarius Commission as a Special Project of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the request of the United Nations. During its last session (July 4-9, 2005, Rome, Italy) the WHO and FAO chastised Codex for "failing to make a significant contribution to human health (Dr. Kirsten Leitner of WHO), suggested that Codex "determine whether it has a relationship to nutrition and, if so, what that relationship is [sic." and, finally, find ways to implement the WHO GS. The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Food for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) and Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) were mandated to provide full discussion during their meeting before the current Codex Commission meeting currently taking place.
Continuing Codex' 43 year history of focusing on trade support to the detriment of consumer protection, the 29th Session of the Codex Alimentarius Commission adopted an agenda which virtually guarantees that there will not be time to find ways to implement a health-friendly World Health Organization Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health since it has been placed as the last item on its agenda. The same tactic circumvented the mandated discussion of this consumer-protective WHO GS and allowed it to escape meaningful discussion at one of the two Codex committees, the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) tasked with determining how Codex can implement consumer-friendly activities. CCNFSDU moved this important item from Agenda item #2 to #11 (last item) and allotted only 13 minutes to its discussion. Surprisingly, the German Secretariat of that committee forgot to pass out a joint letter on the topic by WHO and FAO, Codex parent organizations. After the letter was handed out (7 minutes), the 6 remaining minutes we divided into 3 minutes of discussion and 3 minutes of a slide show inviting attendees to view the pleasant surroundings of the 2006 CCNFSDU to be held the following year in Chaing Mai, Thailand. Three minutes were thereby allotted for this discussion. By guaranteeing inadequate time for discussion of the implementation of the health-friendly WHO GS, the CAC meeting in Geneva has just postponed, perhaps indefinitely, sweeping changes in its activities to include health as a meaningful focus in addition to the already well established trade considerations which drive Codex actions and decisions.
Codex official website, notes "The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations." Despite this articulation of the importance of consumer health, in practice Codex has taken decisions which serve the beneficiaries of the USD $400 Billion global annual food trade. According to health and health freedom advocates and watchdogs like the Natural Solutions Foundation, international consumer health and health freedom are severely undermined by the strongly pro-trade, and non pro-health, actions of Codex Alimentarius through the actions of the global food standards body in the face of an increasingly globalized food supply.
Clinically ineffective level of nutrients which are treated as if they are toxins, highly profitable but dangerously high levels of pesticides and antibiotics, mandatory contamination of the global food supply by procedures such as irradiation and treatment of food animals (including dairy cattle) with growth/sex hormones, Genetically Modified foods, significant weakening of Organic Food standards and other decisions taken by Codex over the years are of grave concern to consumers and health advocates like the internationally active Natural Solutions Foundation, world-wide. Until last year's Codex meeting, these concerns were largely unvoiced by countries because consumer voices were so poorly represented compared to corporate ones. Corporations routinely use their significant resources at Codex to sponsor delegates from developing nations, lobby lucratively for their agendas inside governments and agencies and form and fund Non Governmental Organizations designed to further their positions. Corporate success has been outstanding during the past 43 years.
With the mandated consideration of implementation of the GS by Codex parent organizations WHO and FAO at last year's Codex Commission meeting, a potentially audible voice for consumer concerns was generated. This voice depended upon the outcome of the deliberations of 1. A WHO electronic forum open to Codex member countries followed by 2. Deliberations on the GS implementation by CCNFSDU (November, 2005, Bonn, Germany) and CCFL (May, 2006, Ottawa, Canada) since these two committees were deemed to be the most suitable venues for nutrition-focused discussion and 3. Deliberations of the issue at the current Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting this week.
Giving voice to consumer interests, South Africa proposed 11 pro-health stragegies for this implementation, and reiterated them at the CCFL meeting, inserting them into the final report of that committee for Codex deliberation this week. This deliberation is now restricted to whatever time is left at the end of other deliberations of the Codex Commission on July. Whether the voice of the global consumer will be audible remains to be seen.
Dr. Claude Mosha, this year's Codex Alimentarius Commission Chairman, personally moved to silence that voice with a letter he took the unprecedented step of writing to prevent a highly vocal national delegate from attending this important Codex meeting under the sponsorship of the Natural Solutions Foundation (see "Codex Chairman Seeks to Thwart Natural Solutions Foundation Pro Health Codex Initiative", July 5 PR Web press release.) This action appears to have been undertaken in order to prevent vigorous discussion regarding the GS, assuming that any time is actually alloted to the GS by Codex.
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--
The Laws of Ecology: "All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last."by Ernest Callenbach
posted by Chris Gupta on Wednesday July 5 2006
URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2006/07/05/codex_chairman_seeks_to_thwart_pro_health_initiative.htm
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