Genetically modified foods and their limits

The first genetically modified plant varieties began to be widely planted back in 1996 but ten years later the EU is still an area where farmers and consumers are generally unenthusiastic, if not outright hostile, towards this technology.

While the total area planted with genetically modified (GM) crops around the world has risen to 90 million hectares, 49.8m ha (55%) of this was in the US alone, followed by Argentina (17.1m ha), Brazil (9.4m ha), Canada (5.8m ha) and China (3.3m ha). The amount grown in EU member states is tiny, with Spain leading the field but only with 100,000 ha. Countries such as Portugal, Germany, France and the Czech Republic are growing GM crops, mainly maize, but again, only on a few hundred hectares and primarily for research purposes.

These figures are contained in a report on the global take-up of biotechnology compiled by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, released in January this year. The report’s findings were welcomed by the European biotechnology association, EuropaBio, with the organisation’s director of plant biotechnology, Simon Barber, saying it was "very encouraging" to see the growing number of countries adopting biotech crops.

But Helen Holder, GM campaigns director at Friends of the Earth Europe, says: "Commercial growing doesn’t happen in the EU, apart from a bit in Spain."

The very small amount of land planted with GM in the EU reflects a persistent reluctance among farmers to use GM crops. This in turn derives in part from an awareness that Europe’s consumers are still unconvinced of the merits of genetically modified crops. An EU-wide opinion poll survey carried out by Eurobarometer and published by the European Commission in 2001 found that 70.9% of respondents did not want GM food. National surveys since then have shown 75% of Portuguese against the sale of genetically modified organisms in 2006, 79% of Germans against GM food in 2005 and 60% of British people saying they want to avoid GM foods in 2004.

While EU farmers are not keen to buy and plant GM seeds, it is harder to gauge the attitude to imports of GM crops for animal feed because there is no separation made in import figures for GM and non-GM feedstuffs. On the one hand, only a small number of GM varieties (12) have been approved for sale in the EU. But Friends of the Earth UK estimates that up to 60% of all the Union’s soya imports, around 1.5 million tonnes in 2005, could have contained GM material given the share of planting in biotech varieties and the lack of segregation.

There have been a series of attempts to clarify the legal situation and the approvals procedure for GMs. These have included the adoption of labelling rules and a definition of the threshold (0.09%) of the amount of GM material which can be accidentally present in food and feedstuffs being sold as GM-free. But the approvals process remains slow and often dogged by uncertainty with a vote among member states following a safety evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority of a product being put forward for approval. These votes are often inconclusive and a decision has to be passed back to the European Commission. Adeline Farrelly, EuropaBio communication director, says that the current system is "not workable" for industry and could get even worse, depending on how the EU institutions interpret a call from environment ministers during the 2005 Luxembourg presidency to take more account of opposition to approvals.

The discovery in the EU of imports of rice containing an unauthorised GM strain will only have contributed to boosting consumer uncertainty about the reliability of the approvals procedure and safeguards for preventing unapproved GM varieties onto the market. The prospects for any large-scale uptake of GM crops by EU farmers look very limited indeed.

The first genetically modified plant varieties began to be widely planted back in 1996 but ten years later the EU is still an area where farmers and consumers are generally unenthusiastic, if not outright hostile, towards this technology.