Brussels, 11/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - It was a foregone conclusion. The EU ministers, meeting in the General Affairs Council in Brussels on Tuesday 11 October, failed to secure the qualified majority required (260 votes out of 352) to approve or reject the European Commission's proposal to authorise the cultivation in the EU of the highly controversial genetically modified maize TC 1507 from the American company Pioneer Dupont. This GMO is resistant to certain insects which are harmful to maize, but carries risks to butterflies and moths and other non-target insects, a point flagged up by scientists of EFSA itself (see EUROPE 11014). Result: despite the opposition of 19 member states carrying a total of 210 votes against (Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia), the Commission will make the authorisation decision itself, as it does under the old comitology procedure applicable to this dossier, as the application for authorisation dates back to 2001.
That Romania and the Netherlands changed sides was not enough to swing the balance. Four countries abstained (Germany, Belgium, Portugal and the Czech Republic). Only Spain, Estonia, Finland, the United Kingdom and Sweden supported the proposal.
The debate, which the Greek Presidency agreed to make public, at the request of France - which hoped to pile pressure on to the abstainers - allowed opponents of the authorisation to tell their general public loud and clear of their concerns for health and the environment linked to this GMO, and of their misgivings regarding the European authorisation procedure. It also offered them the opportunity to issue a warning about what could be seen as a coup for the European Commission, and the pitfall of a decision which will be hard to explain to the general public, or possibly even highly damaging to the credibility of the European institutions just a few weeks ahead of the European election campaign. “We need to be credible. If this is the message we are sending out to the citizens, we will see a rise of the extreme right. I call on you all to vote against this proposal”, the Hungarian minister warned. Lambasting “the monitoring and management plans which are insufficient to deal with the direct and indirect effects on the environment and Pioneer's refusal to strengthen its plans, against the opinion of EFSA”, France threw all its weight into urging the Commission not to put its proposal to the vote. Nothing doing.
Commissioner Tonio Borg, and the legal services of the Council called in as reinforcements, said that the Commission had no choice, by virtue of European rules and case-law, than to “adopt the implementing act”, which, the Commission explained, equated to authorising the cultivation of this GMO. “I stress the overwhelming political majority against the proposal, but the absence of a legal majority. This public debate is a good test bench for the comitology procedure. We need to explain it to civil society. It is our destiny”, said Evangelos Venizelos, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Greece, who was chairing the session.
The Commission will now convert its proposal into a draft decision, which it will submit for inter-service consultation, and then to the College of Commissioners. The Commission's wish to relaunch discussions on its proposal of July 2010 to modify EU legislation so that. in future, the member states will be authorised to restrict or ban on their territory the cultivation of a GMO which is authorised at EU level, as long as they rely on reasons other than health and the environment, went down well overall. “The first commitment of the Greek Presidency is to include this debate on the agenda of the Environment Council and possibly of the Agriculture Council”, said the president of the Council.
During the public debate, Borg, referring the member states to their responsibilities, pointed out that EFSA has issued “six favourable opinions”, that the European Commission “has no option but to act without delay” and that the decision it must make on 12 February “stems from legislation enshrined by the Council”. He pointed out that, following an action for failure to act made by Pioneer in 2010, the Court of the EU in September 2013 targeted the Commission for its failure to act as, under Directive 2001/18/EC (directive on the voluntary dissemination of GMO into the environment, which lays down the marketing authorisation procedure for GMOs), the Commission was responsible for submitting the proposal to the Council (case T-164/10), which it failed to do following the inconclusive vote of 2009, in which it was impossible to draw out the experts of the member states within the regulatory committee.
In vain, Hungary read out the declaration annexed to the Council minutes of 28 June 1999, in which the Commission stated that, for sensitive dossiers, it would seek balanced solutions and act in such a way as to avoid opposing predominant positions formed within the Council; Borg was unmoved. He stated that this “non-binding declaration” was valid “upstream of the Council vote”. The representative of the legal service added that “as long as the Council has not acted, the Commission can amend its proposal, which means that it can also withdraw it”. (AN/transl.fl)