Een van de eerste handelingen van de nieuwe EU-Commissaris voor Gezondheid en Consumenten John Dalli vandaag was het toelaten van de teelt van de genetisch gemodificeerde aardappel Amflora, van BASF.
De nieuwe commissie is nog maar een week aan het werk. De verantwoordelijkheid voor gg-gewassen is van de Commissaris voor Milieu naar de Commissaris van Gezondheid verplaatst. Gisteren hield Dalli nog gesprekken met de fracties in het EU-parlement.
Volgens een bericht van Global2000 omvat de vergunning alleen de teelt van Amflora, maar niet het gebruik als voedsel of veevoer. Maar om wettelijke aansprakelijkheid bij contaminatie te voorkomen, is een contaminatie met 0,9 procent toegestaan.

Friends of the Earth published their 2009 copy of their report "who benefits from gm crops?" and that's certainly worth reading (report, summary).
Over the years there has been criticism about the cultivation figures published annually by ISAAA because Clive James repeatedly has refused to give information about where these numbers are coming from while they are continuously refered to as the only available source for GM acreage worldwide. Not surprisingly ISAAA saw an increase in 2008 again, speaking of a "historic milestone"
However, FoE come to a very different conclusion when they reviewed the last ISAAA report as well as figures given by EuropaBio. ISAAA increased the acreage it reports by simply multiplying each hectare by the number of GM traits grown on it. So a hectare of Bt maize is a hectare of GM cultivation, but a hectare of Bt maize with herbicide tolerance adds up to two hectares - at least in the eyes of ISAAA. So if all agricultural land would be grown with triple-stack crops, we suddenly would have three times as much agricultural as before?

On 4 December 2008, the EU environmental ministers decided that there needs to be a better system to assess the risks of GM crops. They cam to the conclusion that it would be especially important to study long-term effects, and that EFSA should pay more attention to the concerns raised by EU member states.

GM crops producing pesticides should be assessed in a similar way as chemical pesticides. Currently there are no clear rules for the kind of studies used to assess long-term effects. While agrochemicals needs to be tested on three different type of animals over periods as long as two years, there are no comparable rules for GM crops. As a result companies can decide for themselves what they want to test how and most pesticide producing GM crops are only tested on one animal (rats) for as little as 90 days.

The environmental ministers also want companies to make all their information about a GMO public. In principle that's already the case now, but companies often declare parts of the documents as 'confidential business information', accessible only for the authorities. In some cases this included the actual sequence of the inserted DNA or the setup of feeding studies - making it impossible for third parties to scrutinize the presented results.
In addition, the environmental ministers want to make it possible for regions in Europe to declare themselves as GM-free, however only on a voluntary basis.
The decisions of the ministers still has to be implemented by the European Commission and by the EFSA.

Die Auswertung von Stellungnahmen und Entscheidungen der EU-Kommission führt vor Augen, dass die EU-Kommission sich mit Verweis auf die Unabhängigkeit der EFSA ihrer Aufgabe entzogen hat, klare Vorgaben für deren Arbeit zu machen, die EFSA-Angaben zu prüfen und zu kontrollieren. Sie hat sich bisher hinter den Gutachten der EFSA versteckt und im Endeffekt Entscheidungsgewalt auf die EU-Lebensmitelbehörde verlagert, obwohl dies laut entsprechenden EU-Vorschriften nicht möglich ist. In einigen Fälle jedoch, z.B. bei den Zulassungsanträgen zum Anbau von Bt11, 1507-Mais und Amflora, widerspricht zumindest ein Teil der EU-Kommission den Gutachten der EFSA.