THE European parliament has agreed to new rules it says will allow it to end its de facto ban on genetically modified food and give consumers choice in the food they eat.
This sounds good, but it is an illusion. For practical purposes the European Union will still be closed to GM food imports and European consumers will be denied choice.
The EU says the strict mandatory new food labelling and tracing system is needed to help build public confidence in the new technology. But if anything, the new requirements will reinforce European consumers’ unfounded but dogged suspicion of GM food.
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The new rules say food or livestock feed with more than 0.9 percent GM content must be labelled. Also, GM products must be tracked at each stage of the market from farm to fork, and the information kept for five years.
The practical result is that no European food processor will touch GM food. The segregation system, tracing and storage of the paper trail will add greatly to the cost GM foods.
Yet consumers won’t pay more for GM food and indeed in Europe the majority of consumers say they won’t buy GM labelled products.
This will deny all access to GM food because no processor wants to incur extra costs for a product that it can market to only a fraction of the population.
It will also throw a global chill on adoption of GM crops because to do so would mean losing access to the European market.
The rules are also hypocritical. They ignore EU cheeses and wines made with the help of GM enhanced microbes, but heap regulation on vegetable oil from GM canola or soybeans even though the oil contains no GM material.
Indeed, the new EU rules are all about the politics of pleasing a skittish electorate and not about science or health. The EU itself admits there is no evidence that GM foods are dangerous.
Governments are responsible for providing systems that deliver safe food to their citizens. They should not for political reasons put limitations on a safe food production system simply because it is new.
Government should allow for consumer choice.
We support a system that allows voluntary labelling of GM-free products and protects consumers against misleading claims.
This would give Europeans a real choice. The 60 percent who don’t want GM food would not be forced to accept it. But GM products would be available for the 40 percent who might try it
We urge the Canadian government to work with the United States and other like-minded countries to continue pressuring the European Union to end discrimination against GM food and to provide real choice to European consumers.
