European regulators are pushing ahead with plans to allow farmers to grow a genetically modified (GMO) potato but focusing first on its use in feed and non-food industries due to opposition from several GMO-wary countries.
Last December, EU biotech experts failed to reach the required consensus to approve the application for cultivation approval, filed by German chemicals group BASF.

Normally, the application should have been escalated to EU environment ministers for debate within three months. If this had happened, and the ministers agreed, it would have been the first EU approval of a GMO crop for growing since 1998. Shortly after that date, the bloc started its de facto moratorium on new biotech authorizations that ended in 2004.

But that process has been stalled, partly due to requests made to BASF for more data on its product -- and partly, officials say, due to reluctance inside the European Commission's environment department to push the dossier forward.

Now, the Commission's food safety department will ask a different experts' committee to approve the potato, engineered to yield high amounts of starch, but for different uses -- not cultivation. This separate approval is also needed under EU law. "A draft decision should be submitted to the regulatory committee in the coming months," one Commission official said. The second EU approval relates to the potato's use in animal feed and other non-food products such as paper. By-products of the starch extraction process, like pulp, are used in animal feed and the potato juice can also be used as a soil fertilizer.

"The authorization (under the EU's GMO food and feed regulation) is complementary to the one for cultivation since BASF only intends to cultivate it in the EU," the official said.

The European Union has long been split on GMO policy and its 27 member states consistently clash over whether to approve new varieties for import -- but without ever reaching a conclusion.


[www.financialexpress.com]