Just last week General Mills announced it would make its original and time-honored Cheerios cereal GMO-free — a surprise move the company said was spurred by consumer demand.

Other documents, made public in a court battle with a pro-labeling group in Washington, previously revealed that GMA was planning on lobbying for a federal law to pre-empt any future state initiatives. But the document obtained most recently by POLITICO, after being circulated to various other food-related trade associations in October, details that plan.

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GMA is looking for a federal solution to GMO labeling that would require the FDA to set up a voluntary labeling standard for foods that do not contain GMOs and determine the safety of GMO products. A section-by-section summary of the food industry’s legislation reveals it would preclude states from adopting any laws that are not identical to the federal requirements and create a legal framework so that FDA can take a more active role in regulating GMO-labeling claims.

Biotech food producers would have to notify the FDA about all new bioengineered foods four months before they could be marketed. Currently, notification is voluntary, but most products go through the process.

“We believe that we need to provide consumers with the confidence that FDA is looking at these ingredients” to ensure they are safe, Finkel said. “Having them look at every GMO trait that’s brought through the process for use in food is important. We believe giving consumers clarity is important.”

The draft further includes provisions that would allow a GMO-free claim to be made on dairy products from cows that consumed GMO feed and drugs developed by biotechnology, as well as foods that have been developed with a genetically engineered enzyme or processing aid, such as cheese and alcohol.

The plan also would require FDA to define the term “natural” — a word that is widely used with little meaning and has been the subject of a tidal wave of litigation against the food industry.

The question now is whether GMA can find a sponsor.

One lawmaker who has been courted by the food industry to introduce its GMO-labeling bill is House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.). A committee spokeswoman told POLITICO several months ago that staffers were hearing from stakeholders on the issue, and planned to get more input before moving forward. The committee would have jurisdiction over GMO-labeling legislation, the spokeswoman said.

The activist group Food Democracy Now got wind of the prospect of an industry bill in September, and issued an action alert to its 650,000-person email list. Dave Murphy, the group’s director, claimed that effort funneled more than 20,000 phone calls to Upton’s office “expressing outrage.”

While it’s not clear who the sponsor would be, there has been some indication that a bill could be proposed in Upton’s committee in the coming months, potentially as early as February or March.

GMA’s outline of its bill is ambiguous about what would be required under the safety review, say Faber, DeFazio and others. It fails to include the environmental and other potential effects of GMO foods and does not apply to genetically modified animals, like the highly controversial AquAdvantage salmon that is waiting for approval by FDA, they say.

Those are potentially significant problems.

“The most important thing FDA could do would be to have a mandatory approval process to help eliminate the concerns [over the safety of GMOs] — so that consumers can rely on FDA’s determination that they’re safe instead of having to rely on DuPont or Monsanto,” said Gregory Jaffe, director of biotech at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group that is supportive of biotechnology but advocates for better regulatory oversight.

But Jaffe, who also reviewed the discussion draft, said it does not sound like the plan would be that much of a departure from current policy because it asks FDA to, within 90 days, say whether it objects to a GMO developer’s own safety determination. In other words, the industry does not appear to be asking FDA to actually make a safety determination on new GMO food products.

“Instead of saying, ‘We don’t object,’ I think the public deserves FDA saying, ‘We’ve reviewed the data and we think it’s safe,’” said Jaffe, who believes that such a safety determination from FDA would help allay some of the consumer concerns about the technology.

“It is good to see that people are acknowledging that there is a need for regulatory improvement and that FDA needs to be more involved,” Jaffe added.