The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established under heavy influence of the pharmaceutical industry in 1963 following resolutions passed at the Eleventh Session of the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1961, and at the Sixteenth World Health Assembly in 1963. From its very beginning CAC's clear intention was to protect corporate interests in the global pharmaceutical and food markets. More on the history of Codex Alimentarius.

To achieve this goal the CAC arbitrarily sets worldwide “food standards” for the World Trade Organization (WTO), which small producers and developing countries find very difficult to meet. While developing countries are thereby excluded from “Free Trade” in the global market by means of often unnecessarily high standards, the pharmaceutical industry uses the CAC as a tool to outlaw all non-patentable natural therapies threatening their global market for patentable synthetic drugs, by simply declaring them illegal or “overdoses”.

The CAC’s laws against effective vitamin therapies in particular triggered worldwide resistance and led to the formation of an unprecedented health movement against the proposed ban on nutritional supplements. Since 1994 Dr. Matthias Rath has led the battle against the Codex Alimentarius Commission and its unelected members, who are often completely uneducated in nutritional science or have direct ties with the pharmaceutical industry.

Since 1994 a consistently growing number of protestors, sometimes in their thousands, have demonstrated in front of the venue of CAC meetings in Berlin, Germany. The CAC still meets in Germany every November, but has had to relocate to the provincial city of Bonn, due to the growing public exposure of its activities in Berlin.

While most countries involved in the CAC still support this undemocratic institution, a growing number of delegates within it have begun to actively question its legitimacy. Several insiders have already publicly confirmed the accusations made by the natural health movement behind Dr. Rath.

At its last meeting in Bonn in November 2004, the national delegation from South Africa presented a proposal capable of finally changing the perverse course that the CAC has followed in the last few years. A leaked document of a participating industry organization confirmed later the “farce” for the pharmaceutical cartel due to the South African initiative.

The South African CAC delegation is to be congratulated for determinedly making life-saving health information about natural therapies available to the people of the world.

Read more about Codex Alimentarius at The Dr. Rath Health Foundation