Protesters Thwart Codex-For Now

The plans of the pharmaceutical cartel were to limit access to vitamins and other natural therapies worldwide through the Codex Alimentarius Commission. They have failed. The proposal, pushed particularly by the German Codex delegation and their chairman Rolf Grossklaus, was not acceptable to the participants at the June 2000 conference.

As many as 15 members of the Codex Alimentarius Commission had prepared their own alternatives to the restrictive German proposals for the "Guidelines for vitamins and mineral supplements" (topic five of the conference). Further commissioners from countries as far away as Tanzania and Uruguay took the floor during the oral dispute. Because of the multitude of opinions, it soon because clear that no consensus could be achieved for restricting vitamins and other essential nutrients on a global scale.

Rolf Grossklaus, the German chairman of the Codex Alimentarius Commission and head of the so-called "Federal Agency of Consumer Health Protection," tried until the very end to have the plans of the pharma-cartel pushed through. But he had underestimated the opinions of the world. "Grossklaus was closely watched by many members," said one Codex delegate.

One Step Back

Codex plans to restrict health information on vitamins and other natural therapies, as well as to establish arbitrarily low "upper limits" for essential nutrients, were pushed back from stage four of the deliberation to stage three. (This relates to an eight-step process of Codex procedure in which stage four is the level of consensus and stage three is the level of further deliberation.)

In other words, no restrictions to vitamins and other essential nutrients, nor to the dissemination of their health benefits, could be established at this Codex meeting. The next meeting of Codex Alimentarius takes place in two years. Until then, the pharma-cartel’s plans to ban vitamin therapies at the level of the United Nations are put on ice.

This was a great success to the Dr Rath World Health Net. Already months before the Codex meeting, members encouraged consultants and everyone interested to write letters of protest via e-mail to the members of the Codex Alimentarius Commission. Within three months alone, more than 300,000 protest e-mails reached the members of the Codex Commission on five continents.

None could ignore this flood. The commissioners realized that the restriction of vitamins is a sensitive issue and they had to prepare their own positions on this important and highly political issue. As a result, almost half of the member countries of the Codex Commission came to Berlin with proposals that were in conflict with the position of the German group and the pharma-cartel.

At the end of June, almost 2,000 people participated in The Dr Rath World Health Net conference "Health for the 21st Century" in Berlin. More than 1,000 people later met in front of the meeting place of the Codex Alimentarius Commission. At these two rallies, contributions by Dr Rath, international guests and patients underlined the significance of the decisions made at the Codex conference for every being on the planet.

Of the People, For the People

Even Codex participants such as the New Zealand delegate, Gene Oden, and the Norwegian delegate, Dag Poleszynski, left their conference to address the people gathered outside the building. They expressed their support for our manifestation and their dissent with the plans of the German Codex group.

Codex member Gene Oden said about the representation of Germany inside the Codex Alimentarius Commission: "Not the bureaucrats inside, but the people here represent the true interests of the German population."

Now is the time to coordinate the next steps:

1. Spread word of this historic victory to the press and by doing so, unmask the background of the witch hunt against vitamins.


2. Talk to political representatives and members of Parliament with the goal to make free access to vitamins and other natural therapies a right guaranteed by law.