Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

European Union regulators sought to give individual EU countries scope to ban imports of genetically modified food and animal feed, risking a renewed trans-Atlantic trade dispute.

The European Commission proposed that EU governments gain a right to opt out of rules making the 28-nation bloc a single market for gene-altered food and feed. With Europe split over the safety of gene-modified organisms, the commission wants to give opponents of GMOs fewer grounds to hold up EU approvals urged by supporters of the technology.

The new initiative is modeled on recent European legislation that lets national governments go their own way on the cultivation of gene-modified crops. That law marked a triumph for proponents of a better-safe-than-sorry European policy on GMOs and dented a free-trade tenet of the EU.

“The new approach aims to achieve the right balance between maintaining an EU authorization system and the freedom for member states to decide on the use of GMOs on their territory,” the commission, the bloc’s regulatory arm in Brussels, said in an e-mailed statement on Wednesday.

The proposal aims to speed up endorsements at EU level of requests to sell food and feed made by biotech companies such as Monsanto Co. and declared safe by European scientists. The political divide in Europe over the risks posed by GMOs has delayed EU authorization to import or grow them, slowing expansion of a global biotech-seed market valued at almost $16 billion in 2014.

Biotech Foods

Biotech foods range from corn to oilseeds in which genetic material has been altered to add traits such as resistance to weed-killing chemicals.

EU governments and the European Parliament, which deliberated for more than four years over the recently approved law allowing a national opt-out on GMO cultivation, must also endorse any changes to the rules on importing gene-altered food and feed. Those talks promise to revive questions about whether Europe gives sufficient weight to science in GMO policy.

The commission proposal foresees that, after a GMO is authorized by the EU for use as food or feed, member governments will have the option to prohibit that biotech product from entering their food chain.

The justification for such an opt-out wouldn’t be allowed to conflict with the assessment of EU food-safety authorities, said the commission. Furthermore, the opt-out would need to respect both EU rules disallowing quantitative restrictions on commerce between member states and the bloc’s World Trade Organization obligations, according to the commission.

‘Overriding Reasons’

“Opt-outs shall be based on legitimate reasons other than those assessed at EU level” and be driven by “overriding reasons of public interest,” the commission said.

National authorities throughout the EU have a say over European-level approvals because the bloc’s common-market rules require that a GMO sold in one member state be permitted for sale in the others. That gives GMO opponents the opportunity to obstruct the European approval process.

The EU ended a six-year ban on new gene-altered products in 2004 after tightening labeling rules and creating a food agency to screen applications.

In a case brought by the U.S., Canada and Argentina, the WTO ruled in 2006 that the European moratorium was illegal. Neither the rule changes during the moratorium nor the WTO verdict altered the impasse in the EU over GMOs.

Political Crossfire

Each of the EU’s GMO authorizations since 2004 has resulted from the commission acting on its own after member states failed to muster a sufficient majority for or against, a stalemate that dragged decisions out for months or years and put the commission in the political crossfire. All the products had been declared safe by European scientists.

Today’s commission proposal was criticized by both anti- and pro-GMO groups.

Environmental organization Greenpeace called the intitiative “a farce,” saying in an e-mailed statement that the opt-out option wouldn’t stand up in court against EU free- market rules and that the commission should have moved to overhaul the European approval process for GMOs in a way that would take greater account of opposition to them.

The European Association for Bioindustries, whose members include GMO manufacturers, said the proposal would limit choice for livestock farmers, weaken the EU economy and rattle innovative companies’ confidence in the bloc’s approval procedures.

The commission “is sacrificing the fundamental principle of the internal market by proposing to set up a patchwork of national bans on imports of safe products,” the association, known as known as EuropaBio, said in an e-mailed statement. It called on the commission to withdraw its proposal.