BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) Ñ The European Commission wants to know how genetically modified crops might affect human and animal health in the longer term, eight years after the European Union first allowed GM crops.
In a tender published on its website, the commission’s environment unit has advertised for interested parties to study the “potential cumulative long-term effects” of individual groups of GM crops and say where more research is required.
Only a handful of GM crops may be grown commercially in the EU, mostly corn types. These crop approvals were issued in 1997 and 1998, before the bloc began a six-year moratorium on new GM authorizations that ended in May 2004.
Read Also
Land crash warning rejected
A technical analyst believes that Saskatchewan land values could be due for a correction, but land owners and FCC say supply/demand fundamentals drive land prices – not mathematical models
“This task should be prioritized to take account of the types of GM plants released within the community at the present time and those predicted in the near future,” the notice said.
Last week the commission held its first debate on GM policy in more than a year, vowing to press ahead with authorizing more GM crops and food, even if EU governments could not break years of deadlock over the issue.
While new approvals are trickling in, they have so far related to imported GMOs for use in food, animal feed and industrial processing. No GM crop has won EU approval for planting since 1998.
“This study is partly about finding out where the gaps are,” an EC official said.
“There are still some things about GMOs that we don’t know … but we know more about them now than we did at the time (in 1997 and 1998).”
However, environmental groups said the tender demonstrated how little EU research had been conducted on the long-term effects of GMOs on human and animal health and the environment.
“We’ve had a huge debate (on GMOs) for eight years and in that time there have been no long-term studies,” said Adrian Bebb, GMO campaigner at the environmentalist group Friends of the Earth.
