Europe's science-free plan for gene-modified crops

A plan is afoot to bring genetically modified crops – mostly resisted for a decade – into Europe's fields.

Currently, European Union countries opposed to GM crops use a voting system that can delay a variety from being grown anywhere in Europe even after it's been cleared of posing any risks to human health or the environment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which vets all applications for Europe-wide approval of crops for growth and human consumption.

The result of years of deadlock is that Europe's farmers are allowed to grow only two GM crops at present – a type of maize called MON863 and a potato called Amflora – compared with the dozens of varieties grown elsewhere in the world.

On 13 July, the 27 member states of the EU will vote on a plan to overhaul the current regulations, but there are concerns that the proposed solution will compromise Europe's current obligation to judge GM crops solely on science. As part of the solution, individual countries will be allowed to give socio-economic or cultural reasons for banning cultivation of GM crops.

The proposed solution has come out of the EU's executive body, the European Commission. Consumer protection commissioner John Dalli argues that nations opposed to GM crops should be free to ban them from cultivation on non-scientific grounds.

The hoped-for payback is that those same nations end their current tactic of stalling the approval process for each submission to grow GM crops in the European Union. The existing Europe-wide process for approving GM crops would carry on as it is, with the EFSA having the final say on whether crops are harmless enough to human health and the environment to be safely grown anywhere in Europe.

Ways around science

This pre-eminence of science in the Europe-wide approval process is the main reason why member states will have to be given other reasons to introduce bans on their own territories. "It would have to be on non-scientific grounds, as it is the EFSA's very role to take the science into account when doing its safety assessments of new genetically modified organisms," says Alexander Stein, an independent consultant in Seville, Spain, who formerly worked at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in the same city.

"Therefore, grounds for banning a GM crop by individual member states can only be socio-economic or cultural ones," he says.

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