Archived press release

EU Moves to Restrict GM Maize Imports

13 April 2005

GM crop scandal - UK supports EU move to restrict US maize imports

The UK has joined EU countries in a unanimous demand for all shipments of maize feed from the US to be certified free of an illegal genetically modified (GM) maize. The agreement, discussed late yesterday [1], comes three weeks after the agrochemical giant Syngenta admitted that it had mistakenly sold unapproved GM maize seeds to US farmers for four years.

Syngenta has since refused to make public the information needed for governments to test food and feed imports for the illegal GM maize. The European Commission is likely to make a final decision on action to be taken in the next few days.

Friends of the Earth has welcomed the de facto ban on the import of US maize-based animal feeds, but it urges the European Commission to go further and:

• Immediately halt all shipments of imported US maize food and feed products unless they can be certified as not containing the illegal GM maize;
• Insist that Syngenta sets up a compensation fund to pay for the testing of maize products worldwide;
• Urgently review the EU's monitoring system to guarantee public protection from unapproved GM products.

Friends of the Earth has written to the Food Standards Agency, demanding that the UK urgently investigates whether contaminated food or animal feed has entered the country. So far however, the FSA has failed to take any action [2].

Friends of the Earth's GM campaigner, Clare Oxborrow said:

“The EU has finally faced up to the need for restrictions on US maize imports but it must now act quickly to protect the public from this unlicensed and untested GM crop. The inability of the biotechnology industry to control its own products makes a complete mockery of the monitoring systems in Europe and the UK.

“In the UK, the Food Standards Agency must work with the European Commission to order an immediate review to ensure that the public is never again exposed to unapproved genetically modified foods by an incompetent biotechnology industry.”

She continued:

"Syngenta's failure to provide the basic information needed to test for their contamination is a disgrace. The Commission must insist that this secrecy ends and Syngenta sets up a fund to pay for testing of food and animal feed. The polluter must pay, not the public."

The contamination incident was first made public through an article in Nature on March 22 [3]. Between 2001 and 2004 Syngenta sold several hundred tonnes of a GM maize seed, called Bt10, to US farmers, mistaking it for another GM maize, Bt11 - which was approved for import into the EU last year. But unlike the Bt11 maize, Bt10 has not been approved for human consumption anywhere in the world. It has been estimated that around 1000 tonnes of the illegal GM maize entered the European food chain and was even planted at test sites in Spain and France.

Syngenta claimed that the Bt10 maize was “physically identical” to Bt11, a view initially endorsed by governments and the European Commission. Friends of the Earth disagreed, pointing out that the unapproved GMO also contained a controversial antibiotic resistance gene, which confers resistance to an important group of antibiotics. Syngenta finally admitted that this was indeed the case [4].

Notes

[1] Member states met in the Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health on 12 April.

[2] Letter from the FSA to Friends of the Earth, hard copy available.

[3] The original Nature article can be found at:
www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/nature03570.html

[4] Bt 10 contains the amp gene, which confers resistance to the ampicillin family of antibiotics. In recent guidance, the European Food Safety Authority stated that GMOs containing this gene should not be approved for cultivation and their use restricted to field trials.

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Published by Friends of the Earth Trust