Bulgaria to ban some GMOs, harmonise with EU

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Bulgaria’s parliament will pass a law on Friday banning the production of some genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to harmonise the Balkan state’s legislation with EU norms.

The law will ban the growing or sale of a list of products including wheat, tobacco, grapes, cotton, roses and all fruit and vegetables.

It will also include GMO products banned in the EU, which Bulgaria aims to join in 2007.

The list did not include genetically modified maize, but was left open so that the agriculture and environment ministries may add items to it in future.

“We are going to pass this law tomorrow,” the head of the parliamentary commission on the environment, Dzhevdet Chakurov, told Reuters on Thursday.

Other GMO foods not on the list will remain strictly regulated and must be clearly labelled as containing genetically modified products.

Many Europeans fear GMO food could be potentially unsafe for humans, and environment groups have accused biotech firms of using poor eastern Europe as a backdoor into the EU, which is still sceptical of biotechnology.

Biotech firms such as U.S.-based Monsanto say the food is safe, while in Bulgaria GMOs have never ignited public debate since a large part of its eight million people live near the poverty line and care mainly about daily survival.

In the mid-1990s, Bulgaria’s Institute of Genetic Engineering was one of the first bodies in the world to develop tobacco strains resistant to disease and pesticides, and it also experimented with apple trees, tomatoes and grapes.

In 1999 GM maize from Monsanto was grown on 12,000 hectares for test purposes, but official data for 2004 showed there were no applications to grow GM maize.

Environment groups fear, however, that some Bulgarian farmers may be growing GMO products illicitly, and also say those grown legally are often fed to stock once harvested, allowing them to enter the food chain.

Fines for breaking the new legislation, due to take effect retroactively from January 1, will range up to one million levs ($684,000).

Bulgaria’s neighbour Romania, which is also in line for 2007 EU membership, hopes to develop large-scale biotech crops.

It currently grows GM soy on 0.4 percent of its total farmland, but has said it would not allow the world’s first biotech wheat, developed by Monsanto, for planting or consumption.

Hungary, one of the EU’s biggest grain producers, became the first country in eastern Europe earlier this year to ban GMO maize, when it outlawed the planting of Monsanto’s MON 810 hybrid seed. 

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