The European Commission is proposing that plants that have been genetically modified at up to twenty different sites of the genome should nevertheless be “considered equivalent to conventional plants”. At these twenty sites, any number of base pairs (nucleotides) may be deleted or inverted, up to 20 base pairs may be completely altered or replaced, any length of contiguous DNA sequences may be replaced by related sequences, and any other alteration of any kind may be made that already occurs in any plant that can be crossed directly with the genetically modified plant or via intermediate steps. No individual risk assessment and approval would be required for those GM plants and they would no longer have to be traceable nor be labelled as GMOs. In short, this would be the end of the precautionary and transparent genetic engineering legislation as we know it and that has been in place since 1990 in various EU directives and regulations, writes Benedikt Haerlin, journalist, former MEP, and expert on GMOs. Haerlin comments that the Commission's new narrative about GM was first hatched over 20 years ago by scientists at Wageningen University. Arc2020; comment by GMWatch

 

 

A single lobby group, Copa-Cogeca, has dominated the EU’s agricultural policy for more than half a century as the self-proclaimed voice of European farmers and agri-cooperatives in Brussels. On the strength of its history and its claim to represent all European farmers, it enjoys privileged access to the EU at all levels of its policy making and it has used that access to actively push for deregulation of GMOs, old and new, and to oppose the environmental reforms proposed by the EU’s Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy, including successfully postponing a law to slash pesticide use and attempting to derail a law that would restore European ecosystems. But a Lighthouse Reports investigation (https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/europes-potemkin-lobby/) into the group found that smaller scale and younger farmers in particular do not feel represented by Copa-Cogeca and that it is pushing the interests of just the biggest farms. In fact, in Romania, Copa-Cogeca represents just 0.1% of the total number of the country’s farms, although these are, needless to say, by far the biggest. When pressed on its claim to represent 22 million EU farmers, Copa-Cogeca admitted this was “more an aspiration than an actual representation of our figures”. Lighthouse Reports via GMWatch on Twitter @GMWatch

 

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