This opening, explanatory essay on Codex was written by President Scott C. Tips in 2007 and forms a body of work about Codex now available on Amazon. President Tips explains the historical progression of Codex.


Many have no idea what Codex is or how it has the power to impact and disrupt lives. Because we’ve come across so many lately who really seek to understand, it seems timely to reprint the first chapter of this compilation exposing Codex and how it works- often against the very health freedom it sets out to protect.We can remain ignorant, if we are, of this body. But in so doing we risk suffering further losses of freedom. We can arm ourselves with knowledge and each provide support for NHF’s work in the ways that are right for us, to stop the progressive loss of our health freedoms. We encourage you to share this article- or better yet – order the book on Amazon. Currently they are  out, but more are on the way for you to help enlighten friends and family in ways they can fight again the progressive loss of freedom in this supposed ‘land of the free’.

Codex Alimentarius
Global Food Imperialism

As is often the case with governmental programs and the ostensibly good intentions that are professed to accompany them, the implementation of those programs and the resulting effects upon the individuals affected by them are invariably negative. Whether it has been the American government’s 35-plus-year-old failed “War on Cancer” or its equally-long and equally unsuccessful “War on Drugs,” for example, each massive increase in taxpayer money thrown at the problem by the government has not resulted in a cure or solution but simply more bureaucracy, more tunnel-vision as to the path to take, and an ever-receding goal still stretching out of reach.

It is perhaps the prime example of the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” This law of nature (which says that an action or program will have the opposite or at least unexpected effect of that intended) seems to dog government actions no matter what they are. And Codex Alimentarius, an international intergovernmental program, enjoys no special exemption from this Law.

Codex Alimentarius is actually a noble concept. The idea – at least the idea put forth to the public – has been for countries throughout the World to adopt a uniform food standards that would allow the free and unhindered flow of food goods among countries and to consumers. This is an idea with which many of us can agree and even embrace. But, as you will read in this book, the actual implementation of this laudable ideal is falling far short of the ideal itself. Indeed, the implementation of this ideal is having the opposite effect of its stated purpose.

The Food Code

Codex Alimentarius is Latin for “Food Code.” It is, and is to be (since the process is still ongoing), a set of standards covering many different categories of food. The Codex Alimentarius Commission is the international body establishing these global trade standards for foods. Created in 1963 as a result of resolutions passed in 1961 at a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) conference, and now sponsored jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the FAO of the United Nations, Codex has some 27 active committees dealing with various food and food-labeling issues from fish and infant-feeding formulas to food additives and vegetable proteins. And each committee is hosted in turn by a particular country that provides both the chairman and the meeting place in that country.

The stated goal of the Commission is to promote and protect the health of the public. This follows from the FAO’s own stated purpose of “achieving food security for all” and its desire “to make sure people have regular access to enough high quality food to lead active, healthy lives.” With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, and the subsequent institution of various trade and other agreements, an additional goal of removing barriers to trade has also emerged.

CCNFSDU

The committee concerned with food supplements is the one with the annoyingly long acronym: the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU), which is hosted and chaired by Germany. Typically, the CCNFSDU meets in Bonn, or near Bonn, every November, although the committee meeting in October-November 2006 took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand in deference to Third World sensibilities.

As its name implies, the CCNFSDU covers a number of agenda items in its meetings, including the ever-controversial infant formula standards, dietary fiber guidelines, proposals for nutrient-content claims, and risk analysis. The CCNFSDU chairman is Dr. Rolf Grossklaus, a German functionary who wields considerable control over the proceedings and who only occasionally faces revolts from the delegates attendees and only then if he has been particularly high-handed.

The delegates to these committee meetings are themselves almost universally regulatory bureaucrats and functionaries themselves, largely out of touch with the interests of the consumers they purport to represent. The United States delegation, for example, consists of the U.S. Representative, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee, and her assistant delegate, yet another FDA who may or may not be listened to by the FDA delegate, depending upon whose interests they represent. To make sure that these private individuals who plump up the U.S. Delegation are properly hamstrung, the FDA requires as a condition of their attendance that they sign a petition form promising that they will not lobby other countries’ Codex delegates at these meetings.

For two years, I myself was a member of the U.S. Delegation attending the CCNFSDU meetings in Bonn, Germany. I found that the views I expressed on behalf of the National Health Federation (NHF), a nonprofit health-freedom organization representing the views of thousands of pro-supplement and pro-health individuals, mostly fell on deaf ears.

It was not until 2002, when the then-U.S. delegate, Dr. Elizabeth Yetley, refused to let me continue being on the delegation that I was spurred into action to obtain official Codex-recognized status for the NHF as an International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) and could then attend and speak out at the CCNFSDU and other Codex meetings unfettered by FDA handcuffs. Indeed, it is really thanks to Dr. Yetley’s refusal, which completely backfired, that the NHF could begin to have an impact at Codex meetings. And we are still the ONLY health freedom organization who can speak, and therein lays our power. Often, in speaking out at the meetings, the NHF has taken a position opposite to that of the United States, which U.S. position the NHF has found to be antithetical to the very principles of health freedom upon which the United States was founded.

The Guidelines

Despite the often-fierce First World-versus-Third World battle over infant formulas, this particular committee achieved even more notoriety and thus the object of focus for health-freedom activists around the World in 1994 when it took up more directly the issue of vitamin-and-mineral food supplements. In doing so, it began establishing “guidelines” intended to govern the international trade in vitamins and minerals.

Interestingly enough, these Codex Guidelines for Vitamins and Mineral Food Supplements are intended to apply only to those jurisdictions (read, countries) where supplements are regulated as foods. Where they are regulated instead as drugs, such as in supplement-hating Norway, these Guidelines are more of a curiosity than something of importance. So, the game has been rigged almost from the beginning. In a bureaucratic form of “heads I win, tails you lose,” the Guidelines will clamp down on both the quality and availability of supplements being sold as food while having no effect on those supplements legally classified as drugs.

The NHF – along with the freedom-loving South African delegate, Antoinette Booyzen – fought hard to prevent or at least slow down the establishment of the recently-adopted Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements. Obviously modeled after the European Union’s Food Supplements directive of 2002, these Guidelines take an anti-health-freedom, bureaucrat-friendly approach to natural substances that purports to protect health and lives through severe restrictions upon the sale and information given about vitamins and minerals. Yet, by making health-saving information about vitamins and minerals virtually impossible to obtain and by limiting consumer access to health-benefiting vitamins and minerals at levels that will actually make a physiological difference, these arguably well-intentioned regulators are ensuring the ill-health of future generations. Used to a toxicological model of dealing with substances they know little about and, hence, mistrust, these Codex bureaucrats are painting everything in their path with a very wide rush and the same color paint. Again, the Law of Unintended Consequences is at work here.
In November 2004, at the Bonn, Germany CCNFSDU meeting, South Africa and the National Health Federation were the only delegations opposing approval by the Committee of these harsh Guidelines. According to Codex procedural rules, the Guidelines were then required to be submitted to the next regular meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission for final review and approval. So it was, then, that at the July 2005 Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting in Rome, Italy (and with Mrs. Booyzen absent), the NHF was the One and Only Voice – out of literally hundreds of attendees – to speak up and oppose the Commission’s adoption of the Guidelines.

It is important to remember, though, that at present these Guidelines are nothing more than a framework, with maximum permitted upper levels for vitamins and minerals to be slotted in under a risk-assessment approach. Ever fearful of vitamins and minerals, which they have never understood, the Europeans are striving to keep a firm lid on the maximum permitted upper levels. And, unfortunately, instead of opposing this straightjacket, the Americans, Canadians, and many others are willing – even eager – midwives to the process.

While the birthing process still has a few years to go, in the regulatory timescale, this is the merest blink of an eye. To us, bureaucrats move glacially slow; but in their strange Einsteinian universe the few years left to complete and fill in the Guideline’s framework is a heart-pounding rocket-ride to the stars.

Harmonization

What many health-freedom activists around the World have long ago realized, however, is that these euphemistically called “guidelines” will be used not only to exclude high-potency American dietary supplements from the European marketplace but they will also be used, either directly or by way of example, to stifle the domestic national markets in supplements as well through a leveling process called “harmonization”.

Importantly, though, harmonization of food standards is not just a Codex process but is a deliberately-planned interlocking process being fitted together through a number of treaties, “agreements,” and regulatory “handshakes” that, once in place, will make it nearly impossible for any countries’ citizens to shake themselves free of this straightjacket. These harmonization processes include, but are not limited to, the World Trade Organization, the Sanitary and PhytoSanitary (SPS) agreements, the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBA) agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Trilateral Cooperation Charter, and the planned North American Union (NAU).
And if any of you are still under the illusion that any government, but especially the American government, is a supporter of health freedom or a protector of health-freedom rights in any way, then you need only look to the actions and words of the FDA. This Agency has not only announced its intention to harmonize U.S. laws and regulations to international standards but it has been acting upon the World stage for years to do just that. It does not matter to the FDA that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) was passed by Congress in order to protect certain of the health freedoms of Americans. The FDA has always hated this law, which removed FDA’s arbitrary enforcement powers (but not, as is often claimed, its regulatory powers), and has been seen that although it cannot yet directly repeal DSHEA, it can and will outflank DSHEA through harmonization with anti-freedom rules, regulations, and ‘guidelines.”

It is not the purpose of this Foreword to explain how this process of harmonization will affect the North American and other global markets in general and dietary supplements in particular, but rather markets in general and dietary supplements in particular, but rather through the following collection of articles gathered together and presented to you in this compilation – written as they were by many of those individuals who have monitored, argued, and written about Codex over numerous years – you will more completely grasp what many have realized and argued is nothing more than a net slowly descending over our collective heads to benefit a few.

Many have claimed that somewhere along the way Codex was hijacked by financial interests antithetical to the true health interests of consumers. Using propagandistic phrases such as “the need to protect consumer health,” these commercial interests have allied themselves with the naturally future-fearing tendencies of government bureaucrats to suppress the rapidly rising use of dietary supplements. What better way to eliminate the competition than to suppress it with regulatory and legislative handcuffs? The pharmaceutical industry, with a global market of more than $600 billion will act, and has been acting, to protect its commercial interests.

The Players

As will be evident from reading this collection of articles and essays, there are many players in this drama. While Sepp Hassslberger, a Bavarian living in Rome, Italy, was probably the first to privately call attention to the Codex threat, and while the National Health Federation began following Codex from afar in 1995-1996, it was John Hammell of the International Advocates of Health Freedom (AIHF) – to my knowledge – who first publicly pulled the alarm bell on Codex in 1996 with his very first article on the subject, republished in National Health Freedom’s publication available on Amazon, Codex Alimentarius, Global Food Imperialism.

Around the same time, Suzanne Harris, a Kansas-City based journalist with degrees in law and political science, began reporting on international Codex meetings at the suggestion of the NHF and with partial funding from the NHF. Her investigations and articles also helped educate many of us to developing events at Codex.

As did Dr. Mathias Rath and his Foundation, which had not only been monitoring Codex meetings but actively demonstrating them as well with large crowds, big signs, and speaking events. While I did not think his demonstrations were effective, Dr. Rath, to his credit, has poured much of his own personal money into fighting Codex restrictions on vitamins and minerals.

Then , in early 2000, with much of my time spent in Europe, I suggested to NHF president Maureen Kennedy Salaman that NHF start sending me to the CCNFSDU meetings in Berlin. Not hesitating even a second, she agreed and the path for the Federation to start regularly attending what up to then it had only been monitoring and reporting on was established. In June 2000, I attended my first Codex meeting and wrote a report – found here – on what transpired. Coincidentally, and although I did not meet them at this Codex meeting, both Sepp Hasslberger of LaLeva and Tamara Theresa Mosegaard of MayDay also attended this Codex meeting for the first time as members of their respective countries’ delegations.

The following year’s meeting in Berlin (with the meeting dates then changed to the Fall) saw the beginning of the involvement of the American Holistic Health Association (AHHA), with both Susan Negus and Suzan Walter attending several Codex meetings and reporting their own observations and conclusions.

Many others have since been inspired to become more familiar with and involved in Codex work. These include Paul Anthony Taylor of both NHF and the Rath Foundation (who began attending Codex meetings in 2003), Diane Miller of the National Health Freedom Coalition, Carolyn Dean of Friends of Freedom International, Brenna Hill of the American Association for Health Freedom, and, more recently, Robert Verkerk of the Alliance for Natural Health. The absence of other, unnamed here, is not intended to slight them in any way, but will probably be more a reflection of my memory, or lack thereof.

Importantly, award-winning film-maker Kevin Miller researched, wrote, filmed, and produced an excellent documentary on Codex Alimentarius called We Become Silent that features some of the individuals mentioned above and presents much information on Codex in an educational and entertaining way. Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench narrates the film.

At the same time, the other players in this Codex drama include the CCNFSDU chairman Dr. Rolf Grossklaus, the EU/EC Codex representative Basil Mathioudakis, Dr. Elizabeth Yetley and her successor, Dr. Barbara Schneeman, as the U.S./FDA delegates, Dr. John Hathcock of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, James Turner and James Gromley of Citizens for Health, and the International Alliance of Dietary Food Supplement Associations. Often at crossed swords with the writers in this book, these individuals and organizations have figured large at Codex meetings or otherwise participated in some way.

Last, but certainly not least, a very important player at Codex meetings has been Antoinette Booyzen, the South African delegate. It was Mrs. Booyzen who, courageously and usually alone among national delegations (although supported by NHF), stood up and faced the ire and even ridicule of the Chairman and many others for daring to speak out for the right of all persons to exercise their right to consume healthy, nourishing foods and supplements. Her undaunted courage at these meetings was an inspiringly frequent occurrence.

What the Future Holds

Although the Codex Alimentarius Commission has adopted the Guidelines, there are still two arenas in which this health-freedom drama will play out. These are the two that bear the most watching.

First, since the Guidelines are nothing more than a framework, they are not useable until the maximum permitted levels are established through the application of risk analysis and risk assessment. So, the fight here will be over how high the vitamin-and mineral potencies will be set, with the pro-health-freedom forces agitating for the highest possible levels and the pro-pharmaceutical interests wanting to minimize the upper levels (and hence the effectiveness) as much as possible. The science is on the side of the proponents of health freedom, but the “beauty” of science merged with politics is that it can be easily manipulated to say whatever its manipulators want it to say. The future will tell us whether truth and scientific integrity prevail or whether politics as usual will rule.

The second arena will be the application of the Guidelines domestically within each country’s national boundaries, otherwise known as “harmonization.” Already, countries are lining up like lemmings to accept whatever cliff-edge Codex standards would have them jump off.

As in the case of the development of Codex standards, harmonization is not simply a process, it has actually become a way of thinking. Numerous countries, institutions, and individuals have come to accept harmonization as inevitable. In a sort of “Borg-like, resistance is futile” fog of mind, they have ceased to question the value of harmonization, or to compare the advantages with the disadvantages, or especially to consider that there might be a far better way to handle the health issues presented to them.

 

It has been often said that to know the future one should remember the past. It is for this reason that the Foundation for Health Research has – with the kind permission of the authors whose works appear herein – compiled and published the ensuing collection of articles in one place so that you, the reader, may see and follow the historical progression of thought on this important Codex issue, an issue that will profoundly affect everyone’s health in the years to come.

Scott C. Tips
President, Foundation for Health Research
April 4, 2007, the European Union