Safety Of Irradiated Food

EDM number 324 in 1989-90, proposed by Martyn Jones on 17/01/1990.

That this House notes that the Australian government has announced a three year moratorium on irradiation of food and called for the World Health Organization to re-open the investigation into the safety and wholesomeness of irradiated food and to produce a properly referenced and scientific report; notes the failure of the UK government Advisory Committee on Irradiated and Novel Foods in 1986 and 1988, and the European Commission's Scientific Committee for Food in 1987, to produce references to support their conclusions on safety of irradiated food; notes recent reports from the London Food Commission which reveal serious inadequacies in the presentation of the safety case and the statement by the former Director of the International Food Irradiation Project that the database at Karlsruhe, West Germany, needs ú100,000 spent on cataloguing and cross referencing before further evaluation can be made of the large body of scientific data that was not reviewed by the Joint Expert Committee of the UN agencies (IAEA/FAO/WHO) in 1980; therefore calls on HMG to contribute finance to this task of preparing the international database for further analysis; to join with the Australian government in calling for a comprehensive, World Health Organisation re-investigation of the safety of irradiated food; and to give a clear undertaking that the current ban on irradiation will not be removed until such an investigation has taken place.

This motion has been signed by a total of 54 MPs.