Brussels, June 7 - European regulators are pushing ahead with plans to allow farmers to grow a genetically modified (GMO) potato but focusing first on its use in feed and non-food industries due to opposition from several GMO-wary countries.
Last December, EU biotech experts failed to reach the required consensus to approve the application for cultivation approval, filed by German chemicals group BASF.
Normally, the application should have been escalated to EU environment ministers for debate within three months. If this had happened, and the ministers agreed, it would have been the first EU approval of a GMO crop for growing since 1998.
Shortly after that date, the bloc started its de facto moratorium on new biotech authorisations that ended in 2004.
But that process has been stalled, partly due to requests made to BASF for more data on its product -- and partly, officials say, due to reluctance inside the European Commission's environment department to push the dossier forward.
Now, the Commission's food safety department will ask a different experts' committee to approve the potato, engineered to yield high amounts of starch, but for different uses -- not cultivation. This separate approval is also needed under EU law.
"A draft decision should be submitted to the regulatory committee in the coming months," one Commission official said.
The second EU approval relates to the potato's use in animal feed and other non-food products such as paper. By-products of the starch extraction process, like pulp, are used in animal feed and the potato juice can also be used as a soil fertilizer.
"The authorisation (under the EU's GMO food and feed regulation) is complementary to the one for cultivation since BASF only intends to cultivate it in the EU," the official said.
MINORITY AGAINST
The European Union has long been split on GMO policy and its 27 member states consistently clash over whether to approve new varieties for import -- but without ever reaching a conclusion.
Analysis of recent voting patterns indicates that the consistent "blocking minority" of EU governments may be eroding as some smaller countries are opting to abstain than reject an application outright -- so weakening the "anti-GMO" camp.
Some countries, like Britain, Finland and the Netherlands, almost always vote in favour of approving new GMOs. They are offset by a group of GMO-sceptic states like Austria, Greece and Luxembourg, that vote against and force a voting stalemate.
In Europe, consumers are well known for their scepticism, if not hostility, to GMO crops, often dubbed as "Frankenstein foods". But the international biotech industry says its products are perfectly safe and no different to conventional foods.
However, approving a new GMO crop for cultivation is seen as almost impossible in the EU's current climate, diplomats say.
"The environment dossier is not going forward," said one representative of a leading environment lobby in Brussels.
"The idea was that these two (applications) would go through together," she said. "They (BASF) would grow it in Europe and the by-products of the starch production and harvesting would be fed to animals. They have to get the two (approvals) together."