BRUSSELS - EU countries will soon demand more clarity on rules for separating traditional, organic and biotech crops, focusing on specific plant varieties to help farmers who want to grow GMOs to be better able to do so.

The European Commission, the EU executive, issued general guidelines back in July 2003 on how farmers should separate the three crop types. The idea was for national governments to make their own laws to facilitate GMO growing if farmers wanted it.

But this was not a legal obligation and most countries have been very slow to draft and adopt laws on an area known in EU jargon as coexistence. Some have not bothered at all.

As of the end of 2005, only four EU states had coexistence laws in place, although several more have notified their plans.

The Commission has come under repeated pressure from several countries to draft an EU-wide coexistence law to cover economic liability for contamination and separation distances. In February, it disappointed many by saying this was unnecessary.

Now, following a major coexistence conference held last month in Vienna, the EU-25 is expected to instruct the Commission to come up with far more specific growing guidelines.

Later this month, EU farm ministers will vote on a paper that asks the Commission to "identify ... best practice for technical segregation measures and ... develop guidelines for crop-specific measures," according to the paper's draft text. "The conclusion from the conference was that we have to develop crop-specific guidelines, as rapeseed is different from maize, for example," a Commission official said. Privately, insiders say the guidelines are unlikely to emerge before 2007.

LAST JIGSAW PIECES

The EU executive should also receive orders to sort out, finally, its views on how much biotech material can be tolerated in seed batches -- and end a three-year row over the EU's last major GMO law. This area has proved so controversial that even the Commission, usually united on GMO policy, cannot agree.

The Commission would "come forward as soon as possible with common labelling thresholds for seeds," the draft paper said.

"... the level of these thresholds should allow freedom of choice throughout the whole food production chain, and it should not create a disproportionate burden for any group of operators," said the document, obtained by Reuters.

Thresholds would be set so that the labelling threshold for final products at the end of the production chain, which the EU has set at 0.9 percent, can be respected.

For once, green groups and the biotech industry can agree that GMO seed thresholds are necessary and long overdue. But they differ widely on the threshold levels that should be set.

What is at stake are the percentage levels of GMO content that can reasonably be allowed in crops like maize and rapeseed before the seeds have to be labelled as biotech.

Batches of conventional seed containing genetically modified material below those thresholds would not have to be labelled.

None of this means, however, that the bloc is about to approve more GMO varieties for cultivation since "live" GMOs remain a highly controversial area for the Commission itself and the EU's 25 member states -- long divided on GMO policy.

Still, coexistence laws and seed thresholds are widely seen as the last pieces of the jigsaw in the EU's plethora of GMO laws. Some EU states say it is essential to have at least seed thresholds in place before new "live" GMOs can be contemplated.