EU to adopt GMO ‘coexistence’ guidelines

Date: 26/06/03

By Karen Carstens

NEXT Wednesday (2 July), MEPs are expected to adopt rules which, for the first time under EU law, will allow member states to come up with their own legislation on how to regulate the "coexistence" of genetically modified (GM) and non-GM crops.

The rules will be part of a law on the labelling of GM food and animal feed.

A separate regulation on the traceability of genetically modified organisms, which aims to identify GMOs at all stages of production and distribution, may also be approved by the European Parliament's plenary in Strasbourg next week.

Once these two regulations enter into force, a moratorium that has frozen the approval of GM foodstuffs in the EU since 1999 could finally be lifted, the European Commission has indicated.

The EU ban has recently come under fire from US President George W. Bush, who accused the Union of contributing to famine in Africa by opposing GM crops (see Page 4).

However, MEPs feel Bush was trying to bully Europe into accepting GMOs and opening up its markets to American companies involved in the sector.

What is new about the food and feed regulation, which sets minimum GM content thresholds for which the labelling of all products would be required, is a sentence that has been inserted after a last-minute legal wrangle over how to deal with the controversial issue of "coexistence".

While the Commission has been pushing for the coexistence of GM crops - when they are planted along with non-GM crops on the same or neighbouring farms - to be regulated on a voluntary basis by member states, green groups and organic or conventional farmers have demanded stringent rules at EU level.

But member states have no authority under existing Union law to come up with their own regulations on coexistence, which has emerged as a major concern.

Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler has promised to present a communication with a set of guidelines on coexistence by the end of July, which member states could then apply as they see fit.

But an NGO campaign to prevent "cross-contamination" - when the GM crops mix with and enter the gene flow of non-GM crops - appears to have paid off.

The upshot is that an originally more stringent formulation presented by the Green MEPs to the Parliament's environment committee was eventually whittled down to one sentence on coexistence specifying that "member states may take appropriate measures to avoid the unintentional presence of GMOs in their products".

The Greens claim this is a compromise that everyone will be able to live with - all political groups in the Parliament, the Commission and the Council of Ministers have given it their seal of approval. "It's a done deal," said one Parliamentary agriculture expert.

The coexistence clause would allow member states to use the Fischler guidelines as an anchor to craft their own rules on the matter.

This falls short of a full-blown EU directive, which many anti-GMO activists would rather have seen, but gives member states a lot of leeway to come up with their own solutions.

Countries including Italy, Austria, Belgium and Portugal, which have been pushing for a harder line on coexistence, are likely to take up the gauntlet and adopt their own coexistence measures as soon as the regulation enters into force.

Other member states, such as the UK and the Netherlands, may be more reticent, the expert said, but "consumers may pressure their governments to act" on coexistence.

Since January, 19 applications for the approval of new GM crops - about half of them for cultivation rights - have been sent to the Commission.

MEPs are expected to approve legislation on 2 July 2003 allowing Member States to regulate the co-existence of GM and non-GM crops.