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EU Blocks France's Ban of Monsanto's GM Maize
redletterdave writes with an update to news from a few months ago that France had banned the growing of Monsanto's genetically modified corn. After reviewing the evidence France submitted in support of the ban, the European Food Safety Authority has now rejected it. An official opinion (PDF) stated that they "could not identify any new science-based evidence indicating that maize MON 810 cultivation in the EU poses a significant and imminent risk to the human and animal health or the environment."
...that MON 180 ~didn't~ pose a health risk, either; more research is probably needed for both parties. The French are not big eaters of corn, anyways.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
.. Amaizing
What about people not wanting massive use of round-up chemicals, small farmers being sued out of existence, and one corporation monopolising the entire seed supply?
If I express sceptisism about the EFSA and its science based conclusions does that make me an antiscience bible thumper?
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Not because the EU overturned the ban, but because the EU can overrule national decisions in such important matters, and a vast majority of other matters in almost all aspects of life.
French authorities may or may not be right about not trusting Monsanto's GMOs, I am not qualified to have an opinion on the subject, but what I see here is that, in effect, they only have a consulting role since a another body in Brussels disagreed and decided otherwise. That's what you get when you relinquish your national sovereignty to a half-assed de-facto federal government that doesn't speak its name.
It's the same for the ability to lower certain taxes, doing protectionism, devaluing the currency they no longer have control of, and a whole slew of important and less important things that define an independent nation. EU member states don't have any real say over these things anymore. That's why I'm amazed to see people in the streets of France celebrate the election of their new prez, hoping for a brighter future with him, when in reality he's just a figurehead with almost no power to do anything meaningful.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
When somebody is trying to sell a herbal medicine or sweetener that has been used naturally for ages they are required to show scientific evidence that it's not harmfull. When monsanto is trying to sell genetically modified seeds a country is required to show scientific evidence that it is harmful.
Something does not compute?
but it could get worse: See The Windup Girl
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Remember. 7 billion people. Norman Borlaug:
"some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".
Somehow, the media is hooked onto the theory that GM modified crops will make us all Zombies.
That is not the problem. I really doubt that these modifications will create crops which will cause health problems.
The actual problem is licensing and economics.
A seed is a thing which cannot be contained. If you neighbor has a crop, seeds will come to you farm.
If its a resilient crop, it may dominate too.
And then they lawyers come with their army, and drag you to court. How many small farmers can afford to fight.
Yes, there will be farmers who will willfully cheat, but right now the licensing model, and the law does not recognize this difference.
To be frank, GM crops can actually help coping with food shortage, but the licensing model has made something which is a boon, a bane.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
This is the actual conclusion;
In conclusion, the EFSA GMO Panel considers that, based on the documentation submitted by France, there is no specific scientific evidence, in terms of risk to human and animal health or the environment, that would support the notification of an emergency measure under Article 34 of Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 and that would invalidate its previous risk assessments of maize MON 810.
Basically, the "significant imminent risk" standard is for the use of "emergency measure[s]". That does not mean that after study it will not be banned but that the emergency powers do not fit.
"GM modified crops will make us all Zombies"
No they're concerned that a bug in the design will crash the system.
Essentially they make major changes to crops that would take evolution centuries to make. They don't tests those changes for centuries, so any faults will come out later. Any major fault can cause a collapse in the food supply which would be deadly to Europe.
They represent a major risk and really the GM lobby's glibness, and willful ignorance of the risk is the real danger here. As for the EU it doesn't have the authority to declare farming safe, it only has the authority to declare it unsafe. They're there to enforce MINIMUM standards below which food supply cannot drop, not 'UPPER' standards above which a country can't insist is met.
It's like the EU banning Bio food because you can't prove it's better than other food.
They have very limited powers to do with internal EU market, and they seem to be abusing that power for corporate benefit.
As I heard in French news a few month ago, It was planned that Monsanto will won at EU. The plan for this year was that. It's almost impossible with a court decision in May to buy and grow seeds for this year in France. Everyone who want to plant corn has already bought real corn seeds for 2012 so France won almost one year.
that the Estados Unidos had that kind of pull over there.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Assuming you're talking about the infamous Canadian case where "small farmer" Percy Whatshisface claimed round-up ready seed blew onto his fields cultivating many acres (this despite being them "terminator" seeds that do not reproduce and an admission from the fellow who illegally sold him the seed), you need to get some facts straight:
Yes, Monsanto is an evil transnational who aims to control the world's food supply.
No, Percy Whatshisface is not an examplary hero of our times; which is why Percy was convicted of illegally growing Monsanto seed to which he had no agreement with Monsanto to grow, whatever the morality of it may be.
Actually you did. You voted in your government (at least your countrymen did) and they decided to join the european union. The argument that you didn't vote them in doesn't wash anymore than saying its a problem that the local government is doing something you don't agree with.
it’s the Monsanto assholes. They don’t just walk over dead bodies. They *don’t do business* if it doesn’t involve walking over dead bodies.
Seriously Eli Lilly, the MAFIAA and Microsoft COMBINED look like fluffy playschool pussies in comparison.
Most scientists I know refer to it as maize when publishing papers, since this is a website that's billed as "News for Nerds", I'd say the use of maize is quite appropriate.
The issue is that the ban in France was even overturned by their own courts as not being scientifically based. They then tried again to get it banned throughout the entire EU and failed again.
Here is a quote;"
EuropaBio, the European biotech industry group, urged French leaders to decide "whether they want to regain their position as a leader of agricultural innovation or support an anti-science agenda that weakens Europe's competitiveness" after a judgment on Monday from Paris's highest court.
You might also want to check this out. Notice how many countries have approved the corn.
Here is an interesting piece of information from this article;
“The new ban is not justified by scientific evidence,” John Combest, a spokesman for Monsanto, said in a e-mail today. The company does not market MON810 in France because “we seek planting where we have broad farmer and government support,” Combest said.
Now why would France want to ban something not even marketed in their country? Perhaps it is that they want to protect their own seed industry at the expense of growers in other EU countries.
Take a look at this article. The EU has yet to order France to lift the ban and nothing will happen till after the election and any new government has shown its intentions. That has not happened.
To summarize, the EU reviewed the corn last year and found no issues. France banned the corn, Their own courts overturned that ban. France banned it again. France applied to get the ban applied to all EU countries. The EU declined. That is where we stand today. The French ban is still in effect but there will be no EU ban.
The EU exists mostly for corporations to have a centralised, emotionally detached authority they can bribe, instead of having to deal with all those annoying national governments. That's the problem with super-governments. The bigger they get, the easier it is to corrupt large parts of the world in one fell swoop.
They're calling it maize because, in Europe, "corn" refers generally to livestock feed.
.: Semper Absurda
Yes, as an EU 'citizen' and someone who worked for the EEC for about ten years [as a consultant, to my shame] I agree with this. The apparatus of Brussels is divorced from the wishes of the great unwashed [us], non-transparent, mediocre, subject to continual lobbying [Axa, Microsoft, Monsanto], undemocratic [the votes 'for' the Euro were exceptionally thin, even in France, had to be 'done again' in Ireland] and unresponsive.
This book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Democracy-Europe-Larry-Siedentop/dp/0140287930 deals with some of the arguments about drift, neo-liberalism and democratic deficit.
Sanity is a relative thing, it's saner than Gadaffi's Libya and probably saner than the worst of corporate America, but not healthy in many other ways.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
You are probably really right on this. The danger is only increasing as now the EU has a president and that some lobbies, mainly from the financial sector, push to give to him more power. As a Swiss citizen, I would love to see the EU as a federation with proportional representation and direct democracy. Only a dream for now...
"could not identify any new science-based evidence indicating that maize MON 810 cultivation in the EU poses a significant and imminent risk to the human and animal health or the environment."
Boy, if that doesn't sound like a public statement bought and paid for by Monsanto...and with their activities elsewhere, I have little reason to believe otherwise.
Welcome to democracy.
One man. One vote. Which, in my country, gives you one 65-millionth of an opinion in every decision.
You may not have "voted" for it explicitly, but I bet you "didn't vote" for some boring by-law related to the keeping of cockatoos explicitly either. What you did, stupidly, was vote for someone you don't know, who (may have) formed a small portion of government who (collectively, and with utter rivals) agreed to laws over the course of DECADES that subjected you to EU law too.
People seriously misunderstand democracy and politics. Hence we end up with people like you thinking they "vote" for any particular cause at all and not just some random local joe you've never met who can do what they like once they get voted in and themselves only form a tiny, tiny percentage of the governing body.
They bought out the research firm which said they were responsible for the bee population Disorder. That should fix it, right?
Maize is an English word. The word corn can refer to a number of things in English. These days it normally means maize, but it was traditionally used to refer to cereal grains grown in England such as wheat, barley, rye and oats. The compound word barleycorn means "a grain of barley", not "a mixture of barley and maize".
Microsoft's lobbying appears to have failed spectacularly then.
Undemocratic except for the elected MEPs that is.
Cultivation and hybridisation is not GM.
I don't necessarily think that's true. If you intentionally subject seed or pollen to radiation in order to bring about far more and higher impact mutations that you can cultivate and screen for viability, I would call that GM, even if you didn't directly manipulate a gene.
And what exactly do MEPs do?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yet often the nations that complain the most about getting Brussel's regulations pushed down onto them were also the nations that had their MEPs in the forefront of getting said regulations enacted. I remember concrete examples of France's politicians all complaining about food safety regulations that were forcing the people selling goods in open air markets needing to invest tens of thousands of € in refrigeration. When in Brussels/Strasboug they voted for it & then campaigned for re-election on anti-EU platform complaining how Brussel's regulations were putting people who didn't have the money out of work.
The EU is a convenient scapegoat for unpopular policies that they enacted.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Information about what you are eating is what the protection of consumers that the EU is keen on is partly about.
Sure sounds like they wanna keep the European Union together, doesn't it?
This is gonna get awfully interesting.
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[...] could not identify any new science-based evidence indicating that maize MON 810 cultivation in the EU poses a significant and imminent risk to the human and animal health or the environment.
Fixating on the health issues is just a distraction from the real problem with GM crops: They're patented, and used to exert control.
What gives the EU the right to force sanity down the throats of the batshit crazy French?
Seastead this.
i would be pissed if i ordered corn and got wheat
it is not called maize in french
"An official opinion (PDF) stated that they "could not identify any new science-based evidence indicating that maize MON 810 cultivation in the EU poses a significant and imminent risk to the human and animal health or the environment"
Except you risk getting sued by Monsanto if your own crop is contaminated by patented seeds.
AccountKiller
Most of the decisions, treaties and so on must be ratified by European Parliament. A great example of functionality of it is approval process of ACTA. Governments were for it, and several even ratified it. Then it came to light that majority of MEPs are against ratifying the act, and as such any and all government ratification was moot.
Protest movement across Europe got a LOT of steam from this piece of news, and soon governments that were about to ratify the agreement, facing two pronged assault from both its citizens (whom they didn't care about much before) and elected government body that could scuttle the entire agreement regardless of their decisions started to back pedal on their ratification processes hard. Suddenly news all over Europe went from "there is no news about ACTA ratification, it's coming and that's the way it should be" to "holy shit, MEPs are telling local governments they won't ratify, parliament's person responsible for working on ACTA resigned from his role citing severe problems with ACTA and we had actual protests on the streets for a while now which we conveniently forgot to report until now".
So yeah, it's powerless until really big decisions come in. Then it has little choice on telling Commission about exact wordings of directives passed, but it can veto them. But when big decisions that many oppose have to be ruled on, Parliament is a force to be reckoned with.
Another subject you may remember Parliament for scuttling is the Patent Act, which was when certain crowd tried to push software patents in EU. It sailed through Commission and local governments, and crashed and burned in Parliament to an extent where supporters essentially had to withdraw the package because in the way parliament was gutting it (as in something that had a chance to actually pass), it would end up more free "as in freedom" then much of current legislation in many member states was.
Third world economies desperately need to transition from subsitence farming to producing cash crops. I'm no fan of Monsanto, but their actions will ultimately be beneficial
No, in order to qualify for World Bank 'loans', third world economies are forced to produce cash crops to sell on the foreign market in order to pay off the self same 'loans'.
Food and Third World "economic miracles"
AccountKiller
What Do GMO Seeds Have to Do With Bee Die-Offs in the Corn Belt?
More proof pesticide causes bee Colony Collapse Disorder
AccountKiller
Mod parent up.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
But the novel is really imaginative and exceptionally well crafted. And in light of the continuing ascendancy of the corporations as the center of gravity of power worldwide it is provocative. The writer asked: "If the oil runs out and we can't solve the energy gap then which corporations will rule?" Answer: Biotech. This is a stretch, but he makes it work. Given the general nastiness surrounding patented food crops, which the original poster made clear, the author took it somewhere very dark.
Furthermore, the book resonated with me in particular as I once spent five years in Bangkok working for the Nong Su Pim Poojadkhan (Manager Newspaper Group). And let me tell you that behind the smiles Thailand is no paradise.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
So, if Monstersanto thinks GMOs are soooo good they should stop objecting to Vermont wanting to label that products have GMOs in them.
Those who make the claim that their ignorant HACKS on DNA are healthy and safe THEY (monsanto) have the burden of proof.
PROVE the GM crops are SAFE before allowing them; if they can't prove it because they lack the understanding required then the science is not far enough to allow it. The risks are too great to gamble on unproven claims.
It is idiotic to invert the argument and require the opposition to have the burden of proof. The NEW products claim to be safe so it is their burden NOT the regulators who ban something that is not known to be safe.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
ACTA
I don't believe this, they didn't even assess the economic impact via fair competition - creating an artificial dependence a-la Microsoft only with food as happened in India.
The story I heard was that in northern India GM took off massively and this created a dependence on Monsanto somehow and that this led to poor people being unable to grow their own food and in isolated cases, close to starving. I don't know how true this story is... need to check the sources
but it's pretty shocking that only the health risks of the current generation of GM products was assessed without the antitrust fair competition side.
A blog I run for the wealth
There is a growing consensus in the EU on increased powers for the EU institutions and towards federalisation to protect the monetary union.
The consensus you talk about is mostly among political leaders. European citizen, on their part, are more and more upset about this UE being working against the general interest. Have you noticed how political leaders now attempt to avoid referendums? Ask the people avout Lisbon Treaty, European Stability Mechanism, or Treaty on Stability, Coordonation and Governance, you will have a huge "no".
UE is getting more and more authoritarian an un-democratic. That will not stand that way forever, and current politiccal leaders will be shown the door. "Que se vayan todos"
You'd be wanting to go back to pre-industrial agriculture then, no? That risks dropping France's agricultural output by over 25%...
If that means dropping production we do not consume, and therefore sell to third world countries, then I am all for it. The UE uses export subsidies so that these product are competitive in poor countries, therefore it wastes UE taxpayer money in order to ruin third world farmers (and increase Mosanto profits, of course)
Like any club France is free to quit, but it won't because the benefits of being in are huge. Being in the club means playing by club rules as decided by the members.
Right, and as a member, France can also change the rules. The alternative is not just obey or quit.