The European Union, poised to lift its five-year ban on gene-spliced foods, will now open the next battle in its biotech saga and try to agree purity levels in seeds, the European Commission said on Tuesday.
Rules for how much GMO material may occur in non-modified seeds before they must be labelled has been a thorn in the side of EU governments, and the Commission, for months if not years.
It will be the last major piece of biotech legislation to put in place before the bloc can discuss authorising new applications for GMOs where the requested use is cultivation.
The EU's moratorium on authorising new GMO products and crops is now effectively over, and the Commission is set to rubberstamp an approval for a biotech maize type known as Bt-11, a canned product for human consumption, at a meeting on May 19.
The next battleground for EU biotech policy - and the fight is certain to be heated, diplomats say - is for "live" GMOs, or those destined for planting in Europe's fields. But before that can happen, the bloc's 25 member states have to sort out seeds.
While a draft Commission proposal on seed thresholds has surfaced in Brussels, with a range of 0.3 to 0.5 percent for permitted GMO presence in conventional and organic seeds, it is far from clear that the EU executive itself is totally agreed.
"On seeds, there will certainly be a discussion within the next couple of weeks. There are different views on this," said EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner David Byrne.
"Those who are looking at the farming interest and those on the more green side of the argument want lower thresholds, which I think might be difficult to achieve," he told Reuters on the margins of an informal meeting of EU farm ministers in Ireland.
Byrne's department, looking at the seeds dossier along with the Commission's agriculture, environment and research units, is said to favour higher thresholds closer to the 0.9 percent labelling level already in force for GMO food and feed.
Higher levels are also favoured by the seed industry, while green groups want nothing higher than 0.1 percent, a view backed by several EU states such as Austria, Luxembourg and Denmark. Byrne said such low levels were not technically practical.
"Some of us take the view that if you go too low, it creates further problems," he said. "Maybe those who are interested in the production of organic foods need to look very carefully at reducing thresholds so low that it's very difficult to achieve."
This week's announcement by US biotech giant Monsanto to suspend plans for introducing the world's first biotech wheat would have no effect on EU policy, Byrne said.
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