But in the article above, Monsanto finally admits that this much-hyped catastrophic "shortage" of legal GM feed continues to remain on the far side of an ever-receding 12 to 18 month horizon!
The EU's resistance to GM food and farming is a crisis for Monsanto, whose profits are decreasing. But informed European farmers continue to source certified Non-GM soy feed from Brazil and other countries. And the US and EU markets for Non-GM fed animal produce are increasing rapidly.
Despite the massive agri-biotech propaganda and lobbying campaigns for the EU to abandon its "zero tolerance" food safety policy for unapproved GM contamination, the issue was not even on the agenda of the last meeting of the Council of EU Agriculture ministers.
Monsanto's suggestion that EU approvals are not based on science is laughable. Regardless of EFSA's opinions on the subject, it's precisely because of the published scientific evidence of their health and environmental dangers that European farmers and consumers simply don't want anything to do with GM food and farming.
Apart from science, we Europeans also use our common sense. We will never allow our food sovereignty to be threatened by patent infringement lawsuits against farmers who would be inevitably contaminated by the introduction of Monsanto's patented GM seeds. This is very political indeed. Monsanto's whining about such political considerations is a further example of the company's absolute disdain for democracy.
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'Feed crisis looming without faster GM approvals'
Mike Abram
Farmers Weekly Interactive [UK], 29 October 2009
http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/2009/10/29/118496/39Feed-crisis-looming-without-faster-GM-approvals39.htm
An animal feed crisis is looming with the continued inability of EU ministers to either approve or reject genetically modified traits for import into Europe, agrochemical company Monsanto has warned.
"The EU situation is 'chaos as normal'," Monsanto's Colin Merritt told a Crop Protection Association-organised meeting of representatives from food chain-related trade associations. "There is still the absurdity of no GM trait goes through as a qualified majority."
The delay in approving traits being grown commercially elsewhere in the world, combined with the EU's zero tolerance for importing feed or food contaminated with unapproved traits, was putting huge pressure on animal feed supplies, he said.
"A crisis is looming, driven by the contamination issue. It is not just me saying this, Mariann Fischer Boel used similar words recently," said Dr Merritt.
Animal feed shipments containing just traces of an unapproved GM trait have been turned away from ports this summer. "You only need some dust from a previous shipment of maize containing one of those traits, say, in a shipment of soya for it to be rejected because of the extreme sensitivity of the testing," Dr Merritt told Farmers Weekly. "But it doesn't add up to any significant level of GM content. It just throws the system into chaos."
Once approval was given, then the contamination level in non-GM feed for that trait was set at 0.9%, he explained.
Whether a crisis occurred or was averted depended on coming up with a solution to zero tolerance, he said. "Talking to suppliers, some are managing to find feed supplies, but with more and more traits coming through, particularly in the US, if we don't get it cracked, it will become increasingly difficult to source non-GM feed."
Some experts are suggesting there will be shortages by December, although Dr Merritt is more circumspect. "It could happen in the next year to 18 months, but I have been hearing that time-scale for the past two years," he admitted.
Two solutions had been discussed, he said. "One is to redefine the 0% threshold, the other, which we would prefer, is to make the current system work according to the timelines set. If traits were approved or rejected in those timelines on the basis of science, rather than the political decisions we have now, there wouldn't be a problem."