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ARIS, Feb. 14 -- The European Union Parliament passed
a measure today that establishes strict rules on genetically modified
organisms, preparing to end Europe's unofficial moratorium on
bioengineered seeds and food.
The overwhelming 338-to-52 vote was cast despite
intense suspicions about genetically modified foods. But the strictness of
the new controls responds to those fears. The rules govern the testing,
planting and sale of crops and food for humans and animals and the testing
and sale of pharmaceuticals.
Under the rules, companies have to apply for licenses
that will last 10 years and pass approval processes. All genetically
altered products will be tracked in a central database that will also mark
the locations of all crops.
A separate bill to set tough food labeling and
tracing requirements is to be ready by April, and it is widely expected to
pass in some form.
With the changes, the three-year-old moratorium may
end soon, perhaps by next year, replaced by systematic rules. "The
earliest you could expect approval for a product is spring of next
year," said David R. Bowe, the British legislator who wrote the bill.
He theorized that varieties that did not flower or were meant solely for
animal consumption could gain approval sooner than others.
Under European Union law, all 15 member countries are
required to make their laws conform to the new rules in 18 months. Several
governments, including those of France and Denmark, said they would resist
approvals.
A spokeswoman for the Parliament said defying the law
would open the countries to a suit in the European Court of Justice in
Luxembourg to force compliance.
"These are the toughest G.M.O. laws in the
world," Mr. Bowe said, using shorthand for genetically modified
organisms. "Even the Greens can't say they're not strict
enough."
In much of the world, in fact, the modified
substances have been welcomed.
Many members of European Green parties were among the
85 abstentions today, as they fear the demise of the informal moratorium.
Mr. Bowe foresaw as much, saying this is "the
beginning of the end" of the ban. Fourteen farm products are
"waiting on the shelf" for consideration, including two types of
corn, a tomato, a beet, a chicory, a rapeseed for canola oil and a cotton,
he said. And because all have been planted in the United States for up to
a decade, Mr. Bowe added, producing documentation for regulators should
not be difficult.
In America, the use of genetically modified seeds in
65 percent of the products on supermarket shelves was hardly questioned
until last year, when an animal-feed corn with a potential allergen in it
was found in taco shells and when manufacturers of baby food refused to
use genetically modified ingredients.
But the modified forms are far more demonized here,
where they have effectively been outlawed since April 1998, when the last
new crop type was approved. British newspapers call them "Frankenfoods,"
and supermarkets in France post signs saying all their food is "sans
O.G.M.," without genetically modified organisms.
Critics like Jos Bov have become popular heroes
for tearing up greenhouses full of test plants. Last week, a prosecutor
asked for a three-month sentence for Mr. Bov for raiding an agronomy
center in Montpellier.
But European scientists and some politicians have
been sounding an alarm. If Europe banned such biotechnology, the United
States would outstrip the Continent in an important field, and the brain
drain would worsen as scientists left for greener prospects across the
Atlantic.
There is little popular understanding of the science
here. Polls say a majority of Europeans see the foods as a health hazard.
Like McDonald's, another target of Mr. Bov, the innovation is portrayed
as an assault by cold greedy American technology on tasty European food
and the close-to-the-soil European farmer.
However fanciful that notion may be, the Europeans
have lost much of the high ground in the trans-Atlantic debate over the
last year because of back-to-back scandals. One case, mad cow disease, is
generally believed to result from cows being fed the ground-up bodies of
infected sheep. It has been found everywhere from Ireland to Italy.
In the second case, cattle feed has been found with
human sewage and carcinogenic dioxins.
After the vote today, the Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace International said the stricter rules should still not allow
the ban to be lifted.
The French government issued a statement saying it
and the governments of Austria, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg and Italy all
wanted the moratorium kept in place. But Mr. Bowe pointed out that the six
countries had helped draft the law and had always had enough votes to
block it in the European Council if they had wanted to.
He suggested that they were pandering to their voters
and said, "I know it's bizarre and not consistent, but since when has
consistency been a virtue in European politics?"
In the European Union, four varieties of genetically
modified corn were approved before the moratorium. But they are rarely
grown, because European processing companies will not buy them. Imports
from the United States have fallen to extremely low levels, the National
Corn Growers Association said.
Modified soybeans are approved only as animal feed.
Little is now imported. But the mad cow problem may force cattle growers
to seek high-protein feeds.
The labeling laws expected in April would require
that any food item with any content from a genetically modified crop be
labeled. Even a soft drink would have to be labeled, if it contained sugar
made from engineered corn or beets, even though there is no genetic
material in the sugar, and it is chemically identical to other sugar.
There has been no requirement to label bags of seeds,
although modified seeds are sometimes mixed in with regular ones. Last
year, farmers in several countries were shaken when they found that some
bags that they had planted contained some modified seeds. There were
demands for their whole crops to be destroyed in the field.
The vote today also called for phasing out the use of
marker genes for antibiotic resistance, first in products and then in the
laboratory. The genes -- useful to scientists because they can tell
whether a subtler genetic change has been simultaneously made by dosing a
plant with antibiotic -- are controversial because of fears that they will
help spread antibiotic resistance. |