Brussels, 03/05/2000 (Agence Europe) - In a release entitled: "Will the MEPs be the last to understand the adverse effects of GMOs?", the European Farmers' Coordination is highly critical towards the European Parliament and calls on ministers not to make the same mistake.
"Voting, on 12 April, for a very lax finalisation of the 1990 directive on GMOs, the European Parliament refused to hear the messages of the public, largely against GMOs", considers the Farmers' Coordination, which affirms that "it has again shown, after the consternating vote over chocolate, that its majority is more sensitive to the interests of industrialists than to those of consumers and farmers". It continued: "the refusal to vote on the amendment attributing to industrialists the civil liability for damage to health and to the environment is a grave failing as far as political responsibility is concerned. It demonstrates that, contrary to what the industrialists claim, the risks are real, so real that they prefer to allow farmers or taxpayers pay the cost".
The Farmers Coordination calls on the European Union ministers not to make the same mistake and to comply with and keep the moratorium adopted in June 1999. At the time when the American farmers are reducing their GMO surface areas, where certain industrialists are forced to reduce their research efforts on GMOs having understood public refusal, it calls on the ministers to stop using GMOs "not only of no use to farmers and consumers but which have potentially disastrous effects at the biological level".