AgroPages-MEPs set to reject GM food/feed opt out proposal-Agricultural news

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The centre right Chair of Parliament’s Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) Committee Giovanni La Via has drafted a report that rejects the proposal and calls on the Commission to withdraw the bill, which would amend the EU’s 2003 regulation on authorisation of GM food and feed (1829/2003) to allow Member States to ban GMOs on their territories.

In the draft report’s explanatory statement La Via notes that the proposal is meant to mirror the system already in place for cultivation so allows the opt-out so that Member States can restrict or outright ban EU approved GM food and feed nationally. However, national measures need to be compatible with the internal market’s free trade rules and the EU's international obligations through the World Trade Organisation. Moreover, national measures must be reasoned and based on compelling grounds which must not conflict with the risk assessment carried out by the European Food Safety Authority – so not on environmental or health grounds. As a final point national restrictions have to be proportional and non-discriminatory.

La Via says that his position reflects the views that Committee members expressed during an 8 June discussion on the proposal with EU Health and Food Safety Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis. “In the debate, Members expressed serious concerns in relation to, inter alia, the lack of an Impact Assessment, the compatibility of measures taken by Member States with the Internal Market and WTO rules as well as the practicability of the proposal. Others voiced their discontent with the fact that Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had stepped back from his initial commitment to review the existing decision-making process for GMOs (i.e. the authorisation procedure itself),” La Via writes, adding that he shares most of the concerns expressed.

The ENVI Chair is particularly unhappy that before the Commission put forward the proposal there was no assessment of all possible impacts and alternative options available, so for La Via, “the proposal conflicts with the “Better Regulation” and “Transparency” pledges made by the new Commission.”

He goes on to stress his “serious concerns about the far-reaching consequences of the proposal for the functioning of the Internal Market for food and feed and for the competitiveness of the Union's agricultural sector.” La Via points out that the EU is highly dependent on the supply of proteins from GM sources and considering that the proposal is likely to have negative indirect effect on imports, he warns that “the proposal may seriously endanger livestock production and also negatively affect agriculture in the EU.”

La Via adds that he “considers the proposal to be almost impossible to implement as border controls no longer exist within the EU's agricultural sector. The re-introduction of such controls between Member States would reverse the economic achievements of the European Customs Union and the Single Market. Moreover, it is unclear how Member States making use of an “opt out” will, in practice, ensure compliance with such measures on their territory.”

Finally, La Via argues that by requiring Member States to provide “compelling reasons” to justify their opt-out while respecting the Internal Market and WTO trade rules, “the proposal fails to ensure the necessary legal certainty and adequate tools for Member States that wish to lawfully restrict or prohibit the use of GM food and feed on their territory. Likewise, the Commission has, to the detriment of legal certainty, not provided any definition of the term “use” in its proposal.”