Green groups slam biotech proposal

Proposed new laws on permissible levels of genetically modified organisms in seeds are “illegal, unscientific, and unfair”, according to a green coalition.

Speaking in Brussels on Monday, the group of six NGOs hit out at a leaked draft proposal on GM thresholds for seeds, which would allow trace levels of GMOs in food with no labelling.

The proposal sets these levels at 0.3 and 0.5 per cent, depending on the crop, and follows on from laws establishing a 0.9 per cent GM level for food.

Benedikt Haerlin, group co-ordinator, said that allowing any GM contamination of conventional food was “like telling a vegetarian that 0.5 per cent sausage in his food was unfortunately unavoidable”.

Haerlin said the proposal broke 2001 EU laws on the 'deliberate release of GMOs'.

Fellow campaigner Eric Gall added that the commission “does not have any reliable scientific basis” for its proposal, as it was using data from 2001 – since which time new studies have emerged.

The 2001 scientific committee opinion referred to also presupposed a one per cent level for food, rather than 0.9 per cent.

Environmentalists say this means the tolerable thresholds suggested for seeds would actually have the knock on effect of a higher level than 0.9 per cent GMOs in the end food products. 

The European community of consumer cooperatives (Euro Coop) said that the commission proposal would “make it impossible to meet consumer demand for non-GM food”.

And the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) upped the stakes still further by saying that allowing biotech contamination would be the “end of the European way of agriculture, which is based on high quality”.

He explained that the green groups would like to see a 0.1 per cent threshold - as is currently in practice the case in Europe.

But this will become much harder with the likely approval of new gene altered crops in the future.

The commission proposes 0.3 per cent for rape and maize, and 0.5 per cent for sugar beet, fodder beet, potato and cotton.

It has thus far set no levels for crops such as tomatoes, wheat or soybeans.

But the biotechnology industry said environmentalists were being “anti-technology” and “unrealistic”.

A spokesman for Europabio told this website: “If the aim is to be against technology, one tactic is to ask for more studies, and the other is to ask for unrealistic rules”.

“Pretending that seeds today are pure is not true.”

“We support the commission in trying to find out what is reasonably unavoidable, in terms of contamination.”

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