By Jeremy Smith
BRUSSELS - EU ministers and national experts are due to approve a
genetically modified (GMO) sugar beet variety this month despite a long
running dispute over the use of biotechnology.
Officials say around 10 GMO products, mostly maize types but also
cotton, soybeans and a high-starch potato, are scheduled for discussion at
various levels of the EU in the next few months.

Although the bloc's member governments clash consistently over GMOs,
never reaching the required majority under its weighted voting system to
authorize new biotech products, that deadlock doesn't stop authorizations
being granted.

Since 2004, the European Commission has approved around a dozen GMO
products -- a move that brings it into line with EU law when, after a
certain time, countries still fail either to endorse or reject a draft GMO
authorization.

The Commission, the EU's executive arm, has authorized a string of
GMOs in this way, outraging green groups.

The first of this year's applications for GMO crops that will be
approved, now a certainty, is a sugar beet called H7-1, developed jointly by
U.S. biotech giant Monsanto and German plant breeding company KWS SAAT AG to
resist glyphosate-containing herbicides.

Due to a complex legal procedure over deadlines for EU ministers to
consider the matter, it will be EU justice ministers who will actually grant
the authorization at their meeting scheduled for September 17 and 18. There
will be no vote.

"I don't really see anything that has changed. The Austrians, and
maybe other countries, will make a symbolic statement but it won't alter
things," one EU diplomat said.

"I think we're soon going to see more emphasis on cultivation
dossiers," he told Reuters.

Some EU countries, such as Britain, Finland and the Netherlands,
almost always vote in favor of approving new GMOs -- offset by a group of
GMO-skeptics including Austria, Greece and Luxembourg, that vote against and
force a stalemate.

In Europe, consumers are well known for their skepticism, if not
hostility, to GMO crops, often dubbed "Frankenstein foods". But the
international biotech industry says its products are perfectly safe and no
different to conventional foods.

POTATO

Perhaps this year's most controversial GMO is a potato, where the
developing company -- German chemicals group BASF -- wants its product to be
grown in Europe's fields.

The potato, engineered to yield high amounts of starch for processing
in the paper industry and also for use as feed, needs two separate EU
authorizations. It is not for human consumption.

The first, related to environmental impact, has also become a
rubberstamp Commission approval that is now probably a matter of time
although no date has yet been given. National EU food safety experts will
discuss the second approval later this year.

When both approvals are given, the potato may then be grown in
Europe -- the EU's first new "live" GMO crop in many years.

And later this month, at their first meeting after the summer break,
EU agriculture ministers are due to discuss three GMO maize types, including
two hybrids that again failed to gain approval at committee expert level
earlier this year.

Also before the end of 2007, EU national experts will debate proposals
to authorize five more GMOs: three Monsanto maize hybrids, a cotton strain
and a soybean type. All would be used in foods, animal feeds or industrial
processing, not cultivated.


[www.reuters.com]