Codex Alimentarius defined - "a book relating to food" or "food code"

If you use vitamin and mineral supplements for health, you might want to fly over to Rome, Italy and crash the July 4-9 meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a little-known international body that wields immense power over the global food market.

Source: © 2005 Peter Byrne. Peter Byrne is an award-winning investigative journalist. He can be reached through www.peterbyrne.info.

If you use vitamin and mineral supplements for health, you might want to fly over to Rome, Italy and crash the July 4-9 meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a little-known international body that wields immense power over the global food market. Should the Codex Commission approve the Draft Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Supplements on its agenda, 300 of the 420 basic vitamin and mineral products commonly used by European consumers will be banned from manufacture and trade inside the European Community.

The ban will seriously impact the export business of U.S.-based supplement companies and could eventually result in similar product restrictions being implemented here. The Codex story has received almost no attention in the corporate press and media; although badly garbled versions of the tale zing about in cyberspace, confusing many readers with conspiracy-laden mixtures of fact and fantasy. Which is not to blame the authors of these emails, since the Codex Alimentarius (Latin for "food code") Commission is so pathologically bureaucratic that its real intentions, and the probable consequences of its actions, are difficult to discern when wading through thousands of pages of jargon in its public reports. For example, it is not true that over-the-counter vitamins and minerals will be banned in the United States after August 2005.

There are so many self-interested players in the "L'affair Codex," that it is nearly impossible to get a straight answer about what it all means from any single participant. It is possible to piece together the basic story from public records, and by listening to what the various interest groups have to say (with several tons of heavily iodized salt). The bottom line of the story is that the emerging Codex regulations on vitamins and mineral supplements have almost nothing to do with promoting human health, and everything to do with facilitating the profits of multinational food and chemical corporations.