1.Biotech industry slams EU Council GMO ruling
2.EuropaBio - a GM Watch profile
3.How each country voted

"EuropaBio has slammed the EU Agricultural Council's decision to uphold a Greek ban on genetically modified (GM) corn, claiming that the judgement flies in the face of EFSA advice on biotech crops." (item 1)

EFSA is the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and its opinions are required by law if any country objects to a company's application to authorize a new GMO product on EU territory. The agency, set up in 2002, conducts its assessments based on data given by the biotech companies that make the GMOs.

This means, as Italy's EU delegation has complained, that EFSA does not conduct any scientific tests to ascertain whether new GM products are safe to use, ie its judgements are wholly dependent on the data supplied by applicants like Monsanto.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5307

In the case of the Monsanto maize MON863, which failed to win EU Agricultural Council approval yesterday, Monsanto's own feeding study on rats showed the maize caused significant changes in factors such as levels of white blood cells, kidney weights and kidney structure when fed to rats.

Such studies are normally not available for wider scientific scrutiny. Monsanto only published the MON863 study after being oredered to by a German court. When independent scientists examined the Monsanto study's methodolgy they pronounced it highly suspect and its findings worthy of more thorough investigation. However, as usual, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) pronounced itself entirely satisfied with the Monsanto study.

As our second item below points out, a leaked report by the PR firm Burston Marsteller produced for EuropaBio - the biotech industry's Brussles based lobby group - warned, "All the research evidence confirms that the perception of the profit motive fatally undermines industry's credibility on these questions". (Communications Programmes for EuropaBio, Burston Marsteller, January 1997). The report encouraged EuropaBio to try and influence politicians and regulators in order that they in turn could win public trust regarding the safety of GMOs.

This is the lobbying strategy Europabio has pursued in its efforts to try and push GMOs into Europe, and that perhaps makes the frustration expressed below by the lobby group at the failure of many countries to kow tow to EFSA advice the more understandable.

As well as the European Food Safety Authority's dependence on the biotech industry for the data it can consider, EFSA's composition and decision making processes have also proven highly controversial.

For why there is such a lack of confidence in the EFSA, see:

*Throwing caution to the wind, a detailed critique of the EFSA and its work on GM foods. The report can be downloaded here: http://www.foeeurope.org/GMOs/publications/EFSAreport.pdf

*A report into the failings of the EFSA's scientific work on genetically modified foods can be downloaded at: http://eu.greenpeace.org/downloads/gmo/Bt11reportOct05.pdf

The European Public Health Alliance, the European Environmental Bureau, Eurocoop, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have all demanded that EFSA:

* Fulfil its legal obligations to take into regard the long term safety of foods as well as the scientific uncertainties

* Review its scientific panels to make them impartial and independent from industry

* Improve its transparency and implement its own Code of good administration behaviour

Their demands can be downloaded from here: http://www.foeeurope.org/publications/2005/EFSA_stakeholders_challenge.pdf

For more on EuropaBio see item 2.
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1.Biotech industry slams EU Council GMO ruling
By Anthony Fletcher
Food Production Daily, 26 October 2005
http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/news/ng.asp?n=63460-monsanto-gmo-eu

EuropaBio has slammed the EU Agricultural Council's decision to uphold a Greek ban on genetically modified (GM) corn, claiming that the judgement flies in the face of EFSA advice on biotech crops.

The organisation, which represents Europe's bioindustry, called the council's inability to reject the Greek Government's temporary ban on Monsanto's MON 810 corn as "disappointing".

"Neither the Greek Government nor any of the authorities have provided any validated scientific evidence to support either a ban or withholding approval to use these products in food," said Simon Barber, director of the plant biotechnology unit at EuropaBio.

"Consequently it is disappointing to see the council's lack of support for the law especially as it is was council that put in place the GM rules in the first place."

The council also failed to reach agreement on decisions to approve foods and food ingredients produced from Monsanto's herbicide-resistant maize GM maize GA 21 and MON 863, a transgenic corn used for food engineered by Monsanto to resist the corn rootworm insect, despite claims that positive safety assessments had been received from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

It is clear that Member States still need to be convinced that introducing genetically modified ingredients into food production is acceptable. From 1998 to 2004 the EU imposed a ban on approving any new GM crops.

Tough new rules on GM ingredient food labelling imposed last year have since cleared a way to end the ban, with a couple of new approvals already passed into the Official Journal.

But as this latest council decision shows, the EU remains significantly divided on this issue. The Commission has, to date, asked EU members over ten times to vote on authorising a GMO food or feed product. But in the large majority of cases, there was no agreement or simple deadlock.

EuropaBio, the European Association for Bioindustries which has 50 direct global m