www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

Europe's farmers will not see any more clarity on EU rules for separating
traditional, organic and biotech crops until at least 2009 as experts sift
through scientific data on specific plant varieties, officials say by Jeremy
Smith .
The European Commission, the EU executive, issued guidelines in July 2003 on
how farmers should separate the three types.

The idea was for national governments to make their own laws to facilitate
growing of genetically modified (GMO) crops if farmers wanted to do so. At
the moment, maize is the only GMO crop that is grown on the territory of the
EU-27.

The guidelines are not legally binding and most countries have been very
slow to draft and adopt laws on an area known in EU jargon as coexistence.
Some have not bothered at all.

Commission officials say only seven EU countries have coexistence laws in
place: Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and
several regions in Austria.

A further eight countries have notified their plans.

Many of these countries have still to develop crop-specific "good farming"
practices, such as field isolation distances and crop-cleaning procedures.
Very few have specific rules on economic liability in cases of
cross-contamination, they say.

For some years, the Commission has come under pressure from several
countries to draft an EU-wide coexistence law. Early last year, it
disappointed many by saying this was unnecessary.

But it did pledge to compile far more specific growing guidelines for
farmers. It doesn't look as if that will happen soon -- work is not due to
start in earnest until the second half of 2007 and then, maybe, take up to
two years.

"Now we need some practical and technical elements for the only crop that is
allowed for cultivation in the Community," said Daniele Bianchi, responsible
for GMO policy in the cabinet of EU Agriculture Commission Mariann Fischer
Boel.

"It will take more than 1.5 or two years to come to some kind of guidelines
or conclusions on this issue," he told a conference last week.

While there is no plan to revise the general non-binding 2003 guidelines,
the latest project envisages more technical detail on crop segregation, a
senior Commission official said.

If EU countries did not intend to develop national crop laws, the Commission
guidelines could be a basis for "voluntary standards" for good farming
practice, he said: a tacit admission that no country would be forced to
adopt a coexistence law.

Last jigsaw pieces

Another longstanding problem in EU biotech policy is the lack of common
labelling thresholds for seeds, or how much biotech material can be
tolerated in seed batches.

The debate over the EU's last major GMO law has been simmering for at least
four years and has been so controversial that the Commission, usually united
on GMO policy, cannot agree.

Thresholds would be set so that the labelling threshold for final food and
feed products at the end of the production chain, which the EU has set at
0.9 percent, can be respected.

What is at stake are the percentages of GMO content that can reasonably be
allowed in crops like maize and rapeseed before the seeds must be labelled
as biotech. Any seed batches with GMO material below those thresholds would
not have to be labelled.

None of this means that the EU is about to approve more GMO types for
cultivation since "live" GMOs remain a highly divisive and controversial
area for both the Commission and the EU-27.

Still, coexistence laws and seed thresholds are widely seen as the last
pieces of the jigsaw in the EU's plethora of GMO laws. Some EU states say it
is essential to have at least seed thresholds in place before new "live"
GMOs can be contemplated.

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