The founding of the Geneva-headquartered Codex Alimentarius Commission in 1963 represented a hope that the powerful corporations controlling our food supply might be regulated into putting public health before profit. Forty-four years later, sad to say, the opposite has proven to be true. Corporate marketing agendas have consistently trumped public health needs, over the objections of consumer groups, during several decades of Codex rulings on food, drink and, most recently, dietary supplements. It is possible that, five years from now, you will need a prescription for your vitamins.

And chances are that your expensive supplements will be manufactured and retailed by large pharmaceutical companies who, using Codex as an instrument of trade restriction, monopolize the world markets for nutritional products.

GlaxoSmithKline is the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Last year, the $45 billion firm, based in Great Britain, sold $1.3 billion worth of “nutritional healthcare” products. Glaxo and its corporate competitors, such as Netherlands-based DSM Corp., are racing to grab sectors of the “emerging” third world market in vitamin and mineral supplements and fortified foods. To achieve this end, multinational firms need the cooperation of governments, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and Codex.

Here’s a good example of Glaxo’s food-imperialism: Throughout Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Middle East, Glaxo brands chocolate-flavored Horlicks as “a nutritional drink made from wheat, milk, and malted barley.” In India, the multinational pharma-food conglomerate advertises the Horlicks line of “extremely tasty” drinks and biscuits as suitable for breastfeeding mothers, people with diabetes, preschool children, “health conscious adults,” and quick energy-seekers. Horlicks, brags Glaxo, is manufactured “as per the guidelines of the Codex Alimentarius.” Be that as it may, one serving of Horlicks Light Malt Chocolate contains a stultifying load of refined sugars, carbohydrates and transfats infused with a mere 17 percent of the recommended daily allowance of 11 vitamins and minerals.

Within five years, corporations such as Glaxo and DSM will be able to tighten their control over the manufacturing and distribution of vitamins and minerals in all their multifarious forms.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission is a regulatory body chartered by the United Nations to standardize the labeling, packaging, safety, and quality of the world’s food supply. Although voting members of the Codex Commission are drawn from governmental bodies, corporate lobbyists wield considerable influence inside the arcane, intensely bureaucratic, years-long process of codifying binding guidelines that are fundamentally changing how vitamins, minerals, and nutritively fortified foods enter the global diet. It is instructive to note that Glaxo holds the officially-sanctioned status of “stakeholder” at meetings of the body in charge of regulating health supplements, the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses; (there are two dozen Codex committees, each with its own food-related domain). Much is at stake: Codex guidelines are more than helpful suggestions; they are quantified rules enforceable by a network of treaties and trade agreements adjudicated by World Trade Organization tribunals.

In addition to the 178 national state delegations that vote on Codex agenda items, meetings are attended by 151 non-voting stakeholders. Industrial food and drug corporations make up nearly three quarters of this influential group. Consumer and public interest groups are a paltry eight percent. The balance of the stakeholders—who are allowed to speak in meetings and to lobby commissioners—are trade associations. Omnipresent corporate lobbyists, such as from the Council of Responsible Nutrition, are attuned to the slightest deviation from the business-first agenda that, according to informed observers, has guided the Codex deliberations for many years.

DSM Corp. is certified by the Codex Secretariat to participate in deliberations. DSM, which grossed $8.3 billion in pharmaceutical and nutritional sales last year, cares about Codex because it is the world’s largest supplier of vitamin and mineral pre-mixes for human and animal consumption. On the other side of the lobbying equation is the National Health Federation of Monrovia, California, the sole American health freedom group accredited to participate in Codex meetings. The NHF assesses Codex as a threat to health freedom because, among other matters, it is setting very low maximum limits on the amounts of vitamins and minerals allowed in dietary supplement forms, especially Vitamin B6, Beta-carotene, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D.

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