Keep ban on GM crops or reap what you sow, warn farmers

Date: 24/01/02

By Laurence Frost

NORTH American farmers who have taken on the big biotechnology companies are urging the EU to maintain its unofficial ban on genetically modified (GM) crops.

Contamination of ordinary crops with modified genes is rife just a few years after North America embraced widespread GM cultivation, the farmers told members of the European Parliament.

'There's no such thing as containment,' said Percy Schmeiser, who runs a farm in Saskatoon, Canada. 'You can't have GM crops in your country and still maintain conventional crops and organic crops.'

Schmeiser was speaking ahead of a debate organised by Green MEPs, signalling the

start of their expected attack on the limited scope of new environmental liability rules proposed by the European Commission.

Under the draft plans tabled yesterday (23 January), companies would be forced to pay clean-up costs for certain kinds of environmental damage caused by their activities.

But green groups are angry that damage by GM crops is excluded from the scope of the directive, except in specially designated nature sites.

The visiting farmers warned that failure to make the biotech firms accountable for contamination in the US and Canada had led to growers being held responsible for damage to their own crops - and even sued for breaching the company's patent. 'If any plant is pollinated by a Monsanto plant it becomes Monsanto's property under patent law,' said Schmeiser, who was invited to Brussels by Friends of the Earth.

In 1998 Monsanto Canada successfully sued Schmeiser for breach of patent after its Roundup Ready genes were found in his oilseed rape crop.

The judge handed Monsanto the rights to the seed developed by Schmeiser over 50 years, ruling that patent infringement occurs 'when the essence of an invention is taken, regardless of the intention of the infringer'. Schmeiser is appealing against the decision.

Green MEP Jill Evans, co-chairing the debate, said the case should persuade her colleagues from other parties of the need to strengthen the new EU liability rules during their passage through the Parliament.

'By all standards of reasonable justice you would have expected someone whose conventional crops have been contaminated to be compensated,' she said, 'not to have to compensate those responsible.

'We'll have to have a proper liability scheme - to have proposals from the Commission that don't include GMs doesn't make sense.'

A French-led group of six countries is blocking the approval of new GM crop varieties in the EU.

• The European Commission yesterday (23 January) published a ten-year action plan to boost the biotechnology industry, arguing that fears over the new technologies was costing EU jobs and economic growth.

North American farmers who have taken on the big biotechnology companies are urging the EU to maintain its unofficial ban on genetically modified crops.