Labelling of genome-edited food products – from consumer trust to consumer responsibility

Today, Norwegian law requires that all products containing more than 0,9% GM ingredients must be labelled as a GMO. The development of new and less resource-demanding techniques is likely to lead to a steep increase in the use of genome-editing in food production. How should the labelling regime look in this new situation? In a recent report by the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board, a level-based approval system for GMO based on the degree of genetic change is presented as a way to adapt the Norwegian Gene Technology Act to new genome-editing techniques. The idea is to simplify the approval process for genome-edited organisms, while retaining non-safety assessments for all organisms, in other words that the products should not only be assessed and labelled with regards to health and environmental risk, but also in terms of so-called non-safety considerations. This paper takes the proposal and the responses to it as a point of departure, and on this basis discusses why and how genome-edited products should be labelled. With globalization and increasingly complex supply chains of food production comes a gradual redistribution of responsibility, both for safety and non-safety concerns (ethical, environmental, societal). In this situation, food producers must communicate more explicitly on issues of quality, health and safety, as well as environmental and ethical values. However, too extensive labelling and product information could lead to confusion rather than improved decision-making skills. In the case of GM, there are controversies concerning everything from health risk, ethics and sustainability. Lack of labelling may have negative effects on public trust, but so could confusing or misleading labelling. Openness and transparency is crucial to build and maintain consumer trust. This paper argues that regulators and food producers should use labelling to provide balanced information about genome-edited organisms – addressing safety issues as well as societal benefit, sustainability and ethics – but at the same time avoiding over-information. It is further argued that consumers in this situation are co-responsible for seeking balanced information in order to take the step from (‘passive’) consumer trust to (‘active’) consumer responsibility.