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Brussels, Belgium
September 2, 2003
Today, the European Commission
rejected Austria's request to exclude GM technology as part of
farming practices in one of Austria's regions. "EuropaBio
(1) welcomes the Commission decision (2) to defend choice for
farmers. No one should have the right to deny farmers access to
the full range of tools and technologies to fight pests and
disease in their crops," said Simon Barber, Director of the
Plant Biotechnology Unit of EuropaBio. This is not a safety
issue. Approved GM products have been judged to be safe and have
been put through stricter and more rigorous health and
environmental safety tests than their non-GM counterparts.
"Successive reports have repeatedly shown that GM crops approved
to date are good for the environment, safe to eat and good for
farmers (3)."
The Austrian protection measure
aimed to block farmers from using the newest technology. There
is no scientific evidence to support Austria's attempt to
exclude the technology on public health or environmental
grounds. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) (4)
concluded, in a published opinion on July 4th, that
"there is no new scientific evidence, in terms of risk to human
health and the environment, to justify the prohibition. Neither
did it find any new data that would change the environmental
risk assessment conducted on GMOs that currently hold marketing
consent in the EU. No scientific evidence was presented to
indicate that the area of Austria had unusual or unique
ecosystems that required separate risk assessments from those
carried out for Austria as a whole or for other similar areas of
Europe."
All approved farming systems
should have a right to exist. Coexistence between different
types of farming practices has been shown to be possible when
practical allowances are agreed for traces of a product
resulting from one farming system found in a product produced by
another method, as is already the case with specialty crops and
organic products.
(1) EuropaBio, the European
Association for Bioindustries, has 35 corporate members
operating worldwide and 21 national biotechnology associations
representing some 1200 small and medium sized enterprises
involved in research and development, testing, manufacturing and
distribution of biotechnology products.
http://www.europabio.org
(2) European Commission rejects
request to establish a temporary ban on the use of GMOs in Upper
Austria
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guesten.ksh?p_action.gettxt=gt&doc=IP/03/1194|0|RAPID&lg=EN;
(3) Examples of studies
EU sponsored research on safety of genetically modified
organisms; DG Research 2001
OECD consensus documents on the safety of novel foods and feeds
(4) European Food Safety
Authority
www.efsa.eu.int
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