European environment, farming and consumer groups are calling on EU member states to vote today in favour of emergency measures to stop imports of US maize that cannot be guaranteed free of an illegal genetically modified corn.

"This seems to be yet another display of deceit, secrecy, incompetence and arrogance from the GM industry. The EU is now faced with the sort of mess that vindicates all our concerns about the problems of GMOs and the risks they pose to us all. Its response must be uncompromising"
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MEMBER STATES URGED TO BLOCK ILLEGAL US MAIZE IMPORTS
EU should go beyond crisis management
Friends of the Earth, European Environmental Bureau, Eurocoop, IFOAM EU group
PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release: FRIDAY 15 APRIL 2005
Contact:
Friends of the Earth Europe, Adrian Bebb: + 49 (0)1609 490 1163 (mobile)
EURO COOP, Francesco Montanari: + 32(0)2 285 7400
EEB, Mauro Albrizio, vice president: + 32 (0)479 940251 (mobile)
IFOAM EU group, Marco Schlüter: +32(0)2 735 2797

Brussels, 15 April 2005 - European environment, farming and consumer groups are calling on EU member states to vote today in favour of emergency measures to stop imports of US maize that cannot be guaranteed free of an illegal genetically modified corn.

The 25 EU countries are voting on a draft Decision by the European Commission (1) which would make it legally binding that all shipments of animal feed from the US are certified free of the experimental GM maize called Bt 10. Since the Swiss-based company Syngenta refuses to give Governments the information needed to reliably test for the Bt10 contamination, the measures proposed by the Commission are likely to result in a de facto ban on the import of US maize-based animal feeds for the foreseeable future.

Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe said: "It is time this contamination stopped. The public should never have been exposed to an untested and illegal genetically modified crop. This incident exposes an incompetent biotechnology industry, an absence of regulation in the United States and a breakdown in Europe's monitoring of food imports."

The crisis around the illegal Bt 10 maize has revealed that the EU does not have the tools to test for the presence of illegal GMOs in the EU's food and feed supply. The European Commission only found out about the illegal maize when the agrochemical firm Syngenta announced three weeks ago that it had sold unlicensed GM seeds to US farmers for four years. (2)

Francesco Montanari of the consumer Co-operatives organisation EURO COOP said: "The Commission only acted once this food crisis was already ongoing. Public confidence is being put at risk once again. The EU should now come up with measures that ensure that such cases of contamination do not happen again."

Whilst the NGOs are backing the Commissions proposal, they are urging the European Commission and the member states to go further and:

* urgently review the EU's monitoring system to guarantee public protection from unapproved GM products. Regular testing should not only take place for maize but also for soya, oilseed rape and other products that could contain illegal GMOs.
* further investigate the potential negative impacts on human health and the environment of the illegal Bt 10 maize (3)
* start an in depth investigation and force Syngenta to reveal how Bt 10 got on to the market and why it took the company four years to discover the mistake.
* insist that Syngenta sets up a compensation fund to pay for the testing of maize products worldwide.

Francis Blake of IFOAM EU group - the organic farmers association- said: "This seems to be yet another display of deceit, secrecy, incompetence and arrogance from the GM industry The EU is now faced with the sort of mess that vindicates all our concerns about the problems of GMOs and the risks they pose to us all. Its response must be uncompromising"

Mauro Albrizio of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) said: "The US authorities and Syngenta are downplaying the health risks of Bt 10. This is misleading, because Bt 10 contains a gene that breeds resistance against the ampicillin family of antibiotics. Under EU law the commercial use of such genes is forbidden on health and environmental grounds." (4)

Contact:

Friends of the Earth Europe, Adrian Bebb: + 49 (0)1609 490 1163 (mobile)
EURO COOP, Francesco Montanari: + 32(0)2 285 7400
EEB, Mauro Albrizio, vice president: + 32 (0)479 940251 (mobile)
IFOAM EU group, Marco Schlüter: +32(0)2 735 2797

Notes:

(1) Member states meet today in the Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health. The draft Commission decision is available from Friends of the Earth.

(2) The incident was first made public through an article in Nature on 22 March. Between 2001 and 2004 Syngenta sold several hundred tonnes of a GM maize seed, called Bt10, to US farmers, mistaking it for another GM maize, Bt11. Unlike the Bt11 maize, Bt10 has not been approved for human consumption anywhere in the world. It has been estimated that around 1000 tonnes of the illegal GM maize entered the European food chain and was even planted at test sites in Spain and France. The original Nature article can be found at:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/nature03570.html

(3) Syngenta claimed that the Bt10 maize was "physically identical" to Bt11, a view initially endorsed by governments and the European Commission. NGOs disagreed, pointing out that the unapproved GMO also contained a controversial antibiotic resistance gene, which confers resistance to an important group of antibiotics. Syngenta finally admitted that this was indeed the case.

(4) Bt 10 contains a gene, which confers resistance to the ampicillin family of antibiotics. In a recent guidance, the European Food Safety Authority stated that GMOs containing this gene should not be approved for cultivation and their use restricted to field trials. Furthermore article 4.2. of the EU's Deliberate Release Directive 2001/18/EC for GMOs says that "genes expressing resistance to antibiotics in use for medical and veterinary treatment" (which is the case for ampicillin) should be phased out by 31 December 2004.