EU Farm Chief Lukewarm on Plan for GMO Crop Law
Jeremy Smith
REUTERS BELGIUM: February 28, 2006 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/35338/story.htm

BRUSSELS - Europe's farm chief may have frozen her project for EU-wide rules to separate traditional, organic and genetically modified (GMO) crops, calling for more time for countries to develop their own national crop laws.

So far, the European Commission has said the EU's 25 member states must take responsibility for how their farmers segregate the three farming types and minimise cross-contamination: an issue known in EU jargon as coexistence.

EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has often said she will address the matter, floating the idea of a vague legal framework sometime in 2006 setting parameters around which governments can enact their own national crop-growing laws.

Now, that idea seems to have been placed in the deep freeze.

In a document drafted by the Commission's agriculture department, and obtained by Reuters, the thinking has changed.

It mentions the need to gather "further experience" on national coexistence laws, and on the EU's wide array of civil liability laws. The document should be published on March 10.

"The limited experience and the need to conclude the process of implementing national coexistence measures do not seem to justify the development of a dedicated harmonised legislative approach at the present time," the document says.

"It remains imperative to maintain a maximum degree of flexibility for the member states to develop specific solutions to achieve coexistence," it says. "The challenge for (them) is to develop economically sustainable coexistence measures."

Even so, it stresses that no decision had yet been taken - and certainly not before a conference on coexistence to be held in Vienna in early April where the Commission plans to hold a "talking shop" with environment groups and the biotech industry.

So far, only two varieties of GMO maize are commercially cultivated in the 25-nation bloc.

BURDEN ON BIOTECH FARMERS

Only a handful of EU countries have specific coexistence laws in place - four, as of the end of 2005 - based on a set of broad non-binding guidelines issued by the Commission in July 2003, although many others are now debating draft laws.

No country had any plan yet to deal with GMO crop growing in regions bordering other EU states, the document said.

Some of the national laws appeared particularly strict and favoured non-GMO farmers over those who wanted to experiment with biotech crops. Most of them placed the burden of carrying out crop segregation on the GMO farmer.

While some states had opted for a general compensation scheme, others encouraged or even required GMO farmers to obtain third-party insurance - not currently available in the EU for economic damage from accidental GMO presence in a non-GMO crop.

And some countries appeared keen to restrict GMO farming as much as possible, it said. In these cases, the Commission has usually sent a draft coexistence law back to the country concerned, warning that its proposed measures might violate EU laws on distorting the single market.

"While differences in the stringency of the approaches cannot be denied, member states have generally made an effort to allow the different production types ... to coexist within a region," the document said.

"(But) in some cases, proposed measures such as isolation distances between GM and non-GM fields appear to entail greater efforts for GM crop growers than necessary," it added.

Proper coexistence laws, whether EU-wide or national, are seen as essential if the Commission wants to ask member states to allow imports of more GMO crops for growing in Europe's fields: the most controversial area in the EU's biotech debate.

Biotechnology continues to split EU governments, even after the EU lifted its unofficial ban in 2004 on authorising new GMO's by approving a modified sweet maize type to be sold in cans.