Codex Alimentarius (Latin for “food rules”) is coming to Australia. According to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), “The proposed Codex Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements will NOT apply in Australia and will have NO IMPACT on the way these types of products are regulated in Australia.” However, despite such fervent denials by various regulatory bodies — and the conspiracy theories that continue to proliferate — the brutal truth is that Australia and New Zealand, as members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), will be obliged to abide by the Codex regulations used by the WTO to resolve international trade disputes.

As the web of complex free trade agreements sweeps across the globe, failure to comply with the international food regulator on nutritional supplement laws may result in trade sanctions — a move, analysts predict, that could cripple important sectors of the economies of WTO member countries that fail to comply.

Described by orthomolecular physician Dr Matthias Rath as “an unscrupulous attempt” to implement “pharmaceutical cartel protection laws” and bolster the “spread of business with disease”, the prospective new global food rules have generated an unprecedented backlash from consumers as far afield as New York, London, Bonn and Johannesburg as they witness the new Food Supplements Directive being gradually introduced across the European Union (EU). The legislation is considered draconian by millions of concerned healthcare advocates who have banded together in an all-out attempt to quash it in what may be one of the most fiercely contested battles for consumer rights the world has ever seen.

So what exactly is Codex and, more importantly, how will it affect consumers throughout Australia and New Zealand? Unravelling the Codex mystique and its global agenda is far from easy.

A brief history of Codex

Although the history of food adulteration and the enactment of protective food codes are as old as the written word, the origins of the present-day Codex date back to the late 19th century, when the Hapsburg government created an organisation known as the Codex Alimentarius Austriacus in a bid to establish uniformity of food standards across the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was superseded by the Codex Alimentarius Europaeus, also known as the European Codex Alimentarius.

Moves to establish an international food safety program were set in motion in 1943 when 44 nations met for a United Nations (UN) conference on food and agriculture to establish an international body to “assist governments to extend and improve standards of nutrient content of all important foods”. From this meeting the present-day Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was born.

The FAO later worked closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) in an attempt to oversee the widening use of chemicals in the food industry, and in 1961 the final piece of the current Codex organisation fell into place when the Council of the Codex Alimentarius Europeaus adopted a resolution to merge its work on food standards with the FAO and the WHO. A year later, the work of the FAO’s Additives Committee was blended into this new establishment and the Codex Alimentarius was born.

With a membership of 143 countries, Codex defines itself as “a code of food standards for all nations”. The organisation has a Commission, which meets biennially, and an Executive Committee with various sub-committees under its umbrella, the most important being, as far as alternative medicine is concerned, the Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (NFSDU), based in Germany.

The Codex Commission itself determines the need for a standard and arranges for it to be drafted. This begins an eight-step procedure in which items such as maximum residue levels (MRLs), codes of practice and guidelines are reviewed twice by the Commission and twice by governments and other interested parties, including food manufacturers, traders and select consumer advocates, before adoption.