By Jeremy Smith
Agricultural powerhouses France and Germany sought on Monday to break
the deadlock that has kept genetically modified crops out of most of Europe,
saying rules must be changed to ease their approval.
"This authorization process of GMOs is highly unsatisfactory and
worrying, it cannot stay like this," German Agriculture Minister Horst
Seehofer told reporters on arriving for a meeting of EU farm ministers.

"One commissioner says it's okay and another says it's not. (It's not
acceptable) that we politicians decide according to a majority and current
mood. This is not how we can deal with it."

The EU has not approved any new GMOs for growing since 1998, in large
part because of huge public resistance to what are sometimes called
"Frankenstein foods."

At present, EU biotech policy involves some five or six departments of
the executive European Commission, who can often be at odds.

But with international grain prices soaring and supply shortages being
faced by the EU's livestock and animal feed sectors, pressure has been
rising for the Commission to do something about the speed at which the EU
approves new GMOs.

French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier echoed Seehofer's comments,
saying time might be needed to review the process.

"There is a very high public sensitivity (over GMOs), a lot of fears,"
he said. "And we don't want to limit imports." "We have to take time to put
procedures into place that can't be challenged," he told reporters. "I back
my German colleague that we have to take time at European level."

"No compromise"

An internal study published by Commission agriculture experts in June
said the EU took a minimum of 2.5 years, and often much longer, to complete
new GMO authorisations compared with an average of 15 months in the United
States.

The other main issue is that since EU law does not give a tolerance
threshold for the accidental presence of unauthorised GMOs that have been
approved in exporter countries, trade flows can be disrupted if an EU-bound
cargo is found to contain them.

In the past, that has resulted in temporary import bans that are a
result of what are known as "asynchronous authorisations."

For the Commission's agriculture unit, this is a big problem. However,
its food safety department, responsible for the temporary bans, is keen to
keep unauthorised GMOs out of the EU food chain with a "no compromise"
policy - but has also suggested reaching agreements with exporter countries
aiming at better coordination between approval processes and rules.

"It is obvious that the problems of asynchronous approvals will be
increasing and we will face huge problems in the agricultural sector," EU
Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel told a news conference.

"To postpone any new approvals will have dramatic consequences. The
production of meat will move out of Europe and then we will have to import
meat (from animals that are) fed with GMO products. So we will be eating it
anyway," she said.
[www.reuters.com]