Brussels, 30/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - Will the European Parliament reject the European Commission proposal on the production and marketing of plant reproductive material? As a first step, this is what the Parliament's agriculture committee is willing to do when it votes on the report on this issue by Sergio Paolo Francesco Silvestris (EPP, Italy) on 11 February. The Parliament's environment committee recommended rejecting the proposal, in an opinion adopted on Thursday 30 January.
On Tuesday 28 January, the Parliament's Greens/EFA Group called for the proposal, which in includes the marketing of seeds, to be dropped. In the Greens' opinion, the draft reportedly benefits the “seeds lobby”. The draft is also contested by the S&D Group which, speaking through Karin Kadenbach (Austria) on Thursday 30 January, criticised the complexity of the rules - which would be a barrier for small actors. Kadenbach believes that extending the scope of the law beyond marketing to production is a “serious problem”. Small producers, who today are out of the scope of the law, would suddenly need to fulfil bureaucratic rules. In Kadenbach's view, this clearly favours big producers because many small producers would be forced out of business. Some members of the EPP, like Albert Dess (Germany), are also calling for the proposal to be rejected - particularly on technical grounds.
This outcry, which has already resulted in 1,461 amendments being tabled, could lead to the draft regulation being rejected at a vote in the agriculture committee on 11 February. The Parliament would then put the matter to the vote at the Strasbourg plenary session on 14-17 April.
According to the chair of the Parliament's agriculture committee, Paolo De Castro (S&D, Italy), “the majority of group coordinators (…) agreed on Monday that the best possible solution at this stage would be to reject the proposed text in its entirety” - a text which was presented by the Commission in May 2013. “The Commission tells us that it's about simplifying the rules applying to a very diversified market with lots of SMEs, but this is not true”, said Bart Staes (Greens/EFA, Belgium). In his opinion, the European market, the third largest in the world, and worth €7 billion, “is already very concentrated”. “In the case of corn, for example, five big companies control three quarters” of the market, Dess stated. (LC/transl.fl)