SLU news

Two ways to give countries in the EU the possibility to grow GM crops

Published: 14 October 2019

What if the EU member states were given the freedom of choice to allow cultivation of new genetically modified (GM) crops in their fields, in a similar way that the countries can today opt-out and ban the only approved GM crop in the EU. How would it work? Dennis Eriksson, researcher at SLU, and his colleagues suggest how a so-called "opt in" mechanism can become a reality.

Since 2015, the EU legislation states that individual Member States can prohibit the cultivation of GM crops within their own borders, even if the crop has been approved for cultivation at EU level. 17 member countries (for example, Germany, Poland, France and Italy), and two regions (Wallonia in Belgium and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) have chosen to take advantage of this so-called opt-out mechanism and prohibited the cultivation of the approved GM maize in their own territories. This maize, approved in 1998, carries a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that produce a protein which makes the plant resistant to insect pests.

Nowadays it never happens that the EU approves a GM crop for cultivation (with one temporary exception in 2010-2012). The decision-making process is in deadlock as some of the member states want to approve specific GM crops and others oppose this. But the countries that want to grow other GM crops then? Should they not, in the name of fairness, be able to apply an opt-in mechanism and "select" new GM crops for cultivation instead of being blocked by some other member countries?

Dennis Eriksson, biologist and researcher at SLU, have together with twelve colleagues from different EU countries, presented how such an opt-in mechanism could work. In the journal EMBO Reports they describe two possibilities. For both alternatives, the crops must first have been assessed as being as safe as a conventional counterpart by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

According to one scenario, the opt-in mechanism could come into force immediately after EFSA's safety assessment of a new GM crop. In that case, Member States would not need to vote on approval for cultivation. The countries that want to grow the crop approved by EFSA do so, and those who do not want to do not. The issue would be "de-politicized" at EU level. However, this would remove the possibility of an EU-wide authorization.

According to the second scenario, the opt-in mechanism could be applied later in the process, after the Member States first voted on whether or not to approve the safety-assessed GM crop for cultivation. Only when the member states fail to make a decision (do not reach a qualified majority), neither for nor against cultivation, then the opt-in mechanism would come into force and it would be up to the member states to make their own decisions. If the mechanism is applied in this way, there is still the possibility of harmonized decisions, which after all is one of the important principles of the Union.

The authors see benefits with both proposals, but believe that applying the mechanism after a vote (which results in no decision in one way or another) would probably be easier to implement politically. That proposal is more in line with the EU's general principles. It would allow Member States to make their own choices when the EU cannot deliver decisions.

Article
Eriksson, D., de Andrade, E., Bohanec, B., Chatzopoulou, S., Defez, R., Leiva Eriksson, N., van der Meer, P., van der Meulen, B., Ritala, A., Sági, L., Schiemann, J., Twardowski, J., & Vaněk, T. 2019. Implementing an EU opt‐in mechanism for GM crop cultivationEMBO reports DOI: 10.15252/embr.201948036


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