As Reported in the News - The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology
Bloomberg

The U.S., Canada and Argentina, the world's biggest growers of gene-engineered crops, called on trade arbitrators in the first hearings of a dispute to strike down a European Union ban on new modified seed varieties, reports Bloomberg.

World Trade Organization judges are expected to rule by October whether the EU's six-year-old moratorium on approving new genetically modified crops is legal under international rules, following a complaint by the three countries. The American Farm Bureau Federation has said the ban costs U.S. farmers $300 million a year in lost corn exports alone.

The EU ``has maintained its moratorium even in the face of the uncontroverted opinions of its own scientists that there is sufficient evidence to reach conclusions about the safety of these products,'' the Canadian government's legal team said in their statement to the three WTO arbitrators.

The European Commission, the 25-nation bloc's executive body, promised last month to speed approvals of the modified foods after endorsing a biotech maize variety that is resistant to the corn borer pest. The seed, made by Basel, Switzerland- based Syngenta AG, was the first approval since 1998 and will become the 35th biotech product allowed on the EU market.

Still, more than 30 gene-altered product applications by companies including Bayer AG and Monsanto Co., the world's biggest developer of the crops, are outstanding.

Global biotech crop sales were worth as much as $4.75 billion last year, according to an industry-funded group, says Bloomberg.

``Many of these applications have received not one, but two, favorable risk assessments by the Commission's own scientific bodies'' and ``have languished at various stages of the approval procedure with only minimal activity on the part of the decision- makers,'' said Canada's complaint.

More than 60 percent of EU citizens probably wouldn't eat foods with genetic modifications even if the goods were cheaper or had less fat, according to an EU survey of about 1,000 people in each country of the then 15-member bloc published last year, said Bloomberg.

As Reported in the News is a weekday feature that summarizes one of the most interesting stories of the day, as reported by media from around the world, and selected by Initiative staff from a scan of the news wires. The Initiative is not a news organization and does not have reporters on its staff: Posting of these stories should not be interpreted as an endorsement of a particular viewpoint, but merely as a summary of news reported by legitimate news-gathering organizations or from press releases sent out by other organizations.