Lawmaking on genetic food is minefield for EU

The European Union remains deeply divided over genetically modified (GMO) foods, with the planting of biotech seeds a tremendously touchy area even though Brussels has resumed authorising GMO products after a break of nearly six years.

Several EU states have passed a patchwork of laws to control growing of biotech crops but many are holding back in the hope that uniform EU rules will be drafted, officials say.

At the moment, EU governments must make their own rules for separating different crop types to minimise cross-pollination and for financial liability if a farmer claims a neighbour's sowings have damaged his crop. Very few have yet done so.

Only a few GMO crops are allowed for growing, mostly maize.

Despite calls for more than a year from anti-GMO diehards such as Austria and Luxembourg for a bloc-wide law on crop separation, so-called co-existence, the EU's executive Commission has declined to oblige.

One result of this approach is that several countries now have laws far stricter than the Commission would have wanted, angering the biotech industry and raising the prospect of legal action for distorting the EU's single market.

Germany's law, perhaps the most controversial so far, has attracted the attention of Commission lawyers charged with checking that national laws comply with EU legislation and also conform with broad Commission guidelines from July 2003.

One clause specifies the joint liability of all GMO farmers with fields that border a "contaminated" non-GMO crop in cases where it is impossible to name an individual farmer as liable.

Critics say this would force a GMO farmer to prove that his crops were not to blame in a neighbour's contamination claim - a powerful and costly deterrent to planting GMO crops at all. "The Commission, being the guardians of the law, should see that the measures introduced aren't disproportionate," said Simon Barber of Brussels-based industry lobby group EuropaBio.

"What the German government has done is way beyond what is required," he said.

FEW LAWS YET

So far, only Germany, Denmark, Italy and five regions of Austria have laws to regulate GMO cultivation, while the main Dutch farming organisations have reached a voluntary agreement.

Another eight countries are drafting laws, with those from Spain, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic the most advanced. Others have no plans yet for legislation.

France, the EU's top cereals grower, should submit a first report on a co-existence law to its parliament in a few weeks.

Farmers who oppose GMO agriculture say their crops risk contamination, while those in favour are angry at the high costs that exercising their right to go biotech will entail.