Brussels, 20/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - An organised network of opponents of genetically modified organisms in the EU, set up in 2003, is gaining ground and stepping up its fight to ensure farmers have the genuine right to freely choose the type of farming they wish to pursue to produce high quality food and preserve biodiversity. Areas of Europe that have declared themselves to be 'GMO-free regions' were able to observe this at the third international conference on GMO-free regions, biodiversity and rural development hosted by the European Parliament Green/EFA Group in Brussels on 19 and 20 April 2007 (see EUROPE 9406). The number of GMO-free regions has mushroomed from 174 to 236 in a year, and the number of municipalities from 3000 to 4200 (not to mention the tens of thousands of farmers who refuse to use GMOs on their farms). All reject the approach taken by the European Commission, and have preferred to launch national bans on the use of GMOs even if authorised using the EU process. At the conference, participants were informed that Bulgaria will be the next member state to follow in the wake of Austria and Hungary and ban the growing of MON 810 maize. Marie-Helene Aubert, Vice-President of the Greens/EFA Group, said that 80% of Europeans oppose GMOs and further GMO bans are to be expected in other countries. The conference participants were very critical at the lack of EU legislation on the coexistence of GM and non-GM crops. To date, the European Commission has only issued guidelines on the development of national strategies and best practices to ensure coexistence (Recommendation 2003/556/EC).
Mission impossible, said Friedrich Graefe zu Baringsdorf (Greens/EFA, Germany), Vice-President of the European Parliament's Agriculture Committee and a supporter of organic farming who sees coexistence as inevitably leading to contamination. We want the Commission to prepare scientifically backed-up draft legislation rather than acting as if a recommendation were a law, he said. He said the Commission's approach amounted to treating public opinion as an idiot. Talking of the coexistence of GMO and traditional crops, the Commission hopes to show that peaceful coexistence is possible and that contamination can be controlled, he said. The EU has not legislated and as a result GMOs and the biotech industry have been able to take root in Europe. In countries were forces were united in banning them, Article 26A of Directive 2001/18/EC had been used to say they didn't want GMOs and the Commission had been forced to accept it, he added. In countries where there was no unity, there are still hundreds of millions of hectares where GMOs are not used. Public mobilisation against GMOs is like the anti-nuclear mobilisations and maybe it is because of this fight-back that the EU will be able to escape from GMOs. Legislation allows GMOs, he said, but it had not been possible to force them on people, which he was delighted at.
Benedikt Haerlin of the German Foundation on Future Farming, coordinator of the European initiative 'Save our Seed' and a member of the board of GENET, the European NGO network on genetic engineering (that organised the conference) said the EU had to invest in researching and growing seeds that promote genetic biodiversity and is based more on local varieties. Biodiversity in nature, she explained, is the only concept that has demonstrated its worth in terms of adapting to changes in the climate and environment. She pointed out that cutting genetic diversity was known to lead to extinction.
Thijs Etty, researcher and lecturer in law at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Amsterdam Faculty of Law, said that lack of legislation on coexistence was the “missing link” which harmed the effectiveness of a very complex regulatory framework, which concentrated exclusively on authorisation and distribution. By taking national legislations, which it deems to be too strict, to the Court, the Commission was surreptitiously harmonising, doing thus what it refused to do officially. He said it would be better to have minimum harmonisation at European level, best agricultural practice, civil responsibility schemes in the event of damages by concentrating on the cross-border dimension of damages.
Pascale Loget, Vice President of the Council of Brittany, France, felt that, after the Florence Charter, which, in February 2005, provided a guide to GMO-free regions on how to protect conventional and organic crops, the implementation of the Rennes Declaration as a platform of minimum requirements for coexistence was decisive. “As long as this platform is not put in place, the moratorium on crops has to remain.” (an)