Brussels, 04/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - A European Commission report of a series of audits carried out in member states between 2011 and 2013 “to assess the official controls of genetically modified organisms including their deliberate release into the environment” found serious failings that the greatly concerned NGO Food and Water Europe flagged up on Tuesday 3 February.
In the view of the NGO, the flaws revealed and the lack of controls identified do not augur well, at a time when new EU legislation (amendment of Directive 2001/18/EC) could, from this spring, open the door to new cultivation authorisations in the EU by giving the member states greater room for manoeuvre in banning or restricting the cultivation within their borders of GMOs that have been authorised at EU level (see EUROPE 11230 and 11229).
“A good deal of noise is being made about the recent changes to European GM crop approvals, but almost nothing is said about the ongoing failure to honour the laws governing GM crop production. The Commission's own audit makes sobering reading for farmers and other citizens, who may well wonder how well we really are protected”, said Food Policy Analyst Eve Mitchell of Food and Water Europe.
The report published by the Commission in December of last year reveals, for example, that: - some member states are permitting contamination of seed with GM varieties that are not approved for cultivation in the EU, thus breaching the laws on both seed purity and seed labelling; - the authorities are allowing illegal contamination of non-GM products with GMOs without complying with the labelling requirement; - failings were discovered in sampling and communication of results: if testing is not conducted properly, or if labelling law is simply ignored, shoppers cannot have faith in what they are buying, says Food and Water Europe; - monitoring for long-term environmental impact by Monsanto's MON 810 GM maize is “limited largely to anecdotal or casual observations”; - in the absence of internal or cross-border controls, farmers are buying GM seed over international borders and bringing it into the EU to grow: the report says that the location of such fields is unknown to the countries concerned and that, in one country, the authorities were not even aware of GM crops in their territory that Monsanto itself had informed the EU were being grown - something that is “of particular concern to countries wishing to ban GM crops”, the NGO says.
The 2011 audit of Spain's GM crop production showed a failure to use accredited laboratories for GM testing dating back to at least 2005.
The report is available at: http://ec.europa.eu/food/fvo/overview_reports/details.cfm?rep_id=67 and the report on Spain at: http://ec.europa.eu/food/fvo/rep_details_en.cfm?rep_id=2970 (AN)