Brussels, 16/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament supports the European Commission in wanting to amend EU legislation applying to honey (Directive 2001/110/EC) so that, in future, pollen is defined as a natural constituent of honey and not as an ingredient, which will mean that GM pollen found in honey escapes labelling obligations. Following the rapporteur, Julie Girling (ECR, UK), a large majority of the Parliament endorsed the proposal presented by the Commission to clarify the status of pollen in honey in response to a preliminary decision of the Court of Justice in 2011, which affirmed that pollen was an ingredient (case C-442/09) (see EUROPE 10974).
MEPs rejected the proposal put forward by the parliamentary committee on the environment aimed at rejecting the Commission's proposal. The rapporteur received a mandate to begin negotiation with Council. “The ingredient/constituent argument has arisen due to the labelling implications of each option. If pollen continues to be considered a 'constituent', any GM pollen present would not need to be labelled. This is because, according to the GM regulation, only GM content above 0.9% needs to be labelled. Since pollen only forms around 0.5% of any batch of honey, it would never exceed the labelling threshold”, said Girling.
Sophie Auconie (EPP, France) followed this up with irony, saying: “Some of my colleagues who are so full of good intentions thought they could go against nature and deny that pollen is naturally present in honey. It's like adopting laws for defining the yolk of an egg as an ingredient of the egg and making it compulsory to state the characteristics of the yolk on the egg”.
The Greens/EFA Group is not pleased with this vote that upholds a proposal that it describes as hypocritical. It deplores the fact that a majority of MEPs followed the Commission at the expense of the beekeepers that it claims to protect. Bart Staes of Belgium, who is the group spokesman on food and environment issues, noted that, “with EU countries importing honey from GM producing countries and two of the main EU honey-producing member states (Spain and Romania) having authorised the production of this GM maize, honey contaminated with GM pollen will increasingly be available on our shop shelves.” Sandrine Bélier and José Bové, who are members of the environment and agriculture committee, state that the use of GMOs is associated to the use of pesticides and to a model of agriculture that is not in favour of bee welfare, beekeepers, farmers or consumers, who are moreover clearly opposed to the presence of GMOs in their food. Denouncing the fact that the Commission has resorted to a “semantic ploy” to allow GM pollen to be considered a natural constituent of honey, they say that, by hiding honey contamination by GMOs from consumers, GMO producers win the day over the beekeepers who want to produce GM-free honey.
In 2011, the Court ruled against the marketing, without prior authorisation, of honey contaminated by pollen from the genetically engineered maize MON 810. Faced with a preliminary question on the interpretation of Directive 2001/110/EC, the Court described pollen as an ingredient of honey, arguing that pollen is found in honey mainly due to the intervention of the beekeeper. It is worth remembering that a German beekeeper, who had detected pollen from GM maize MON 810 in his honey, had challenged the legal status of the honey. By way of that decision, honey containing pollen from MON810 maize should, logically, have been subject to the labelling obligation (which is applied when there is more than 0.9% of pollen from GMOs authorised in human food) in line with the legislation applying to GMOs. (AN/transl.jl)