Europe‘s Food Safety Agency says banned GMOs pose no risk
Date: 9.5.2006
Brussels - Europe's leading food safety agency gave the green light on Wednesday for five genetically modified (GMO) crops and foods that are banned in certain EU countries, saying they posed no risk to human or animal health.
Between 1997 and 2000, five EU countries banned specific GMOs on their territory, focusing on three maize and two rapeseed types that were approved shortly before the start of the EU's six-year moratorium on new biotech authorisations.
In a report requested by the European Commission, the Italy-based European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said there would be no risk for all five GMOs to be placed on EU markets.
"The European Commission asked EFSA to provide a scientific reply to questions relating to five ... GMOs subject to safeguard clauses invoked by certain member states to restrict or prohibit their use at national level," EFSA said. "EFSA's ... GMO Panel concluded that ... there is no reason to believe that the continued placing on the market of the five GMOs is likely to cause any adverse effects for human and animal health or the environment," the agency said in a statement.
Last June, the Commission, the EU's executive arm, tried to get all the bans scrapped. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has also attacked these "national safeguards", as they are called in EU jargon, for breaking international trade rules.
But EU environment ministers rejected proposals for the five states -- Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Luxembourg -- to lift their restrictions. EFSA's opinion comes on the same day that the 25 members of the Commission are holding a debate on GMO policy where EFSA will come in for criticism by some commissioners -- notably those representing environment and food safety -- for not being transparent and relying too much on data given by biotech firms.
The GMO products that are the subject of the national bans are made by international biotech giants Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer.
"Source"[http://www.checkbiotech.org/root/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsletter&topic_id=6&subtopic_id=33&doc_id=12615].
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