Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales Euro MP JILL EVANS is urging the European Commission to back down on plans which could open the door to new GM product approvals across the EU.

Her plea comes just days before the 17th October deadline for EU countries to implement new laws regulating the release of GMOs into the environment. Out of fifteen countries to date only Denmark has implemented the legislation. This raises fears that new GM products could be approved without crucial safety regulations.

In a letter to Commission President Romano Prodi and Commissioners Margot Wallstrom (Environment), David Byrne (Health & Consumer Protection) and Franz Fishler (Agriculture) the all-Wales MEP says that the Commission has a duty to refuse new approvals of genetically modified products until laws on all aspects of safety are in place.

Speaking from Brussels Jill Evans said:

"I am very concerned about recent statements by Commissioners Byrne and Wallström indicating that the current ban on new commercial GMOs should be lifted on 17 October.

"Although we have welcomed the tough new directive on the release of GMOs into the environment, at the moment it is full of loopholes. As yet, Denmark the current holder of the EU presidency, is the only Member State which has implemented it.

"The European ban on new GMOs should not be lifted until the question of liability for environmental damage caused by GMOs is resolved."

Ends.

NOTE: Copy of letter follows

Open letter (08/10/02)

Dear President,

Dear Commissioners,

De facto moratorium on GMOs

It has been brought to our attention that the Commission is currently in the process of preparing a statement anouncing the end of the de-facto moratorium for GMO marketing applications, to be published around 17 October 2002, when the deadline for the implementation of Directive 2001/18/EC on the deliberate release of GMOs into the environment expires.

While our Group welcomed the adoption of Directive 2001/18/EC back in February of last year, we always shared the view of those Member States which insisted that no new GMOs should be authorised for marketing before existing loopholes of the Union's biosafety framework have been closed. In fact, we were pleased to see that also the Commission seemed to share this view, as it stopped to insist on Council votes on marketing proposals.

Consequently, we are surprised by and concerned about the most recent statements of Commissioners Byrne and Wallstöm indicating that the approval procedure for commercial GMOs should be resumed on 17 October. These statements ignore the following aspects:

While Member States, the Commission and Parliament agree that a comprehensive traceability scheme, a new regulatory scheme for the authorisation and labelling of GM food and feed and a new set of rules for the export of GMOs to Non-Member States are urgently needed, no agreement has been achieved yet with regard to the scope or the modalities of these schemes. In fact, the proposed regulations[1] might not be in force, let alone be operational before summer of next year.

So far only one Member State has transposed Directive 2001/18/EC into national legislation. There may be various reasons for this slow implementation process. However, one of the reasons certainly is that the Commission itself proposed in July of 2001, i.e. only 5 months after the adoption of the Directive, far-reaching and highly controversial amendments to the Directive. The Commission did not only propose the introduction of a threshold for the presence of unauthorised GMOs in food and feed products, it also proposed dramatic and far-reaching changes to the marketing approval procedure for GMOs to be used as food or feed. In this situation Member States were left with two alternatives: either to amend within a very short period of time their national legislation twice or to wait and see. For obvious reasons, most Member States went for the latter.

The Commission itself did not seem to pursue its own implementation tasks under the new Directive with great enthusiasm:The important guidelines on monitoring of GMOs, for example, were only recently adopted by the Council after the Commission had failed to secure a quailfied majority in the competent regulatory committee.No register for information on the genetic modification of commercial GMOs, as required by Art. 31.2 of the Directive, has been established yet.

Finally, what remains unresolved is the question of liability for environmental damage caused by GMOs. Even though the proposed Directive addresses such damage at prima facie, the broad exceptions and the narrow definition of 'biodiversity' make it very unlikely that the proposed liability regime could ever cover any environmental damage, caused by GMOs. Similarly unresolved is the issue of GM contamination which is very likely to cause considerable economic damage to conventional and organic farmers if producers and users of GMOs are not required to take preventive measures to avoid contamination of other products.

In the light of these considerations, we would like to emphasize that it is pivotal that no GM products are approved until the Union's biosafety framework, including legislation on traceability, GM food/ feed, export of GMOs to Non-Member-States, environmental liability and GM contamination, is complete and actually in operation.

We therefore urge you to make very clear on 17 October 2002 that no GM products will be approved until the European Union and its Member States have completed a regulatory framework adequately addressing these issues and all necessary measures have been taken to control compliance with this framework.

Your sincerely,

Jill Evans, MEP

Monica Frassoni, Co-President of the Greens/EFA

Nuala Ahern, MEP

Hiltrud Breyer, MEP

Fredrich Wilhelm Graefe zu Baringorf, Vice President of the Agriculture Committee

Ian Hudghton, MEP

Dr. Carolione Lucas, MEP

Paul Lannoye, MEP

Prof. Neil Maccormick, MEP

Alexander de Roo, Vice-President Environment Committee

[1] Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on genetically modified food and feed (COM(2001) 425); Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning traceability and labelling of genetically modified organisms and traceability of food and feed products produced from genetically modified organisms and amending Directive 2001/18/EC (COM(2001)182); Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the transboundary movements of GMOs (COM(2002) 85).