Council of Ministers agrees on deregulation of GM plants

On Fri­day 14 March, the 27 EU mem­ber states reached an agree­ment on the dereg­u­la­tion of plants pro­duced using new genet­ic engi­neer­ing tech­niques, known as “new genom­ic tech­niques”. A qual­i­fied major­i­ty of mem­ber states backed the com­pro­mise pro­pos­al put for­ward by the Pol­ish EU pres­i­den­cy. Many agri­cul­tur­al and envi­ron­men­tal organ­i­sa­tions had crit­i­cised the pro­pos­al.

The qual­i­fied major­i­ty was achieved after Poland, Greece and Bel­gium changed their posi­tions to sup­port the text. With this sup­port, the Pol­ish Pres­i­den­cy can now start tri­logue nego­ti­a­tions with the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment and the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion.

Franziska Achter­berg, of Save Our Seeds, com­ment­ed: “The min­is­ters have clear­ly caved in to pres­sure from large multi­na­tion­al biotech com­pa­nies. By allow­ing untest­ed and unla­beled GM crops to be released into the envi­ron­ment and onto our plates, they are putting both peo­ple and nature at risk. They are also depriv­ing con­sumers of their right to avoid GM food.”

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