Monsanto Sues Germany Over Corn Ban
US biotech giant Monsanto is suing Germany over its decision to ban the planting of its genetically modified corn type MON 810.
Monsanto confirmed a report in the Handelsblatt newspaper that it had filed a suit in a court in the northern German city of Braunschweig, aiming to overturn the ban on GM corn.
German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said last week that the corn is dangerous for the environment, specifically Monarch butterflies and other insects.
"There is a justifiable reason to believe that genetically modified maize of the type MON 810 presents a danger to the environment," she told reporters.
The MON 810 strain is the only genetically modified corn variety approved in the European Union and was approved for commercial use in the EU in 1998.
Germany Bans GMO Maize
The only variety of maize approved by the EU for commercial growing and usage within Europe has been banned by Germany.
The Monsanto variety, MON810, cannot now be sown in Germany said the country's Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner.
Aigner told reporters that "there is a justifiable reason to believe that genetically modified maize of the type MON 810 presents a danger to the environment."
Although she was at pains to point out that this was not a decision against all GMO crops per se, environmentalist groups are seeing the move as a major victory.
Resistance to Biotech Threatens EU Feed and Livestock Industries
(Feed Info) -- The animal feed industry is well-placed to influence the turbulent changes taking place in the global agricultural sector but the European Union's hard-line stance on genetically modified organisms (GMO) risks seeing its farmers and feed producers left behind, warns EuropaBio's Willy De Greef.
The Secretary General of the European association for Bioindustries said the animal feed sector is a potent player in world agriculture but the global powerbase is gradually shifting to emerging economies in South America, Former Soviet Union states and especially Asia – due in part to their extensive use of GM crops.
Mr De Greef said: “Animal feed plays a huge role in the overall agricultural policy agenda because it is such a huge customer of the crop production sector. Some 25-30% of annual global production goes to animal feed, which is about 600 million tonnes. That gives the sector a lot of clout and therefore the feed sector is part of the innovation agenda.”
While the growth in importance of countries such as China, Brazil and India may be inevitable, the difficult challenges facing Europe’s feed manufacturers and farmers are exacerbated by the EU’s politically motivated opposition to GMOs, said Mr De Greef.
He points to forecasts that Brazil is trying to oust the US as the world’s leading exporter of agricultural commodities and that China, which was self-sufficient in soybean a decade ago, now imports some 30 million tonnes a year - 98% of which is used in animal feed – as two examples of this power shift in progress.
Mr De Greef said growing demand for meat from the more affluent economies of China and India was now a more important issue than biofuels.
He explained that China’s per capita annual meat consumption has more than doubled to 55kg in the last 20 years - adding that every extra kilogramme of meat consumed by the Chinese triggers a huge increase in demand for animal feed.
“In the last year, there has been a heated debate about biofuels and food cost but people forget that real revolutions in as big a sector as this often come from a trend that is invisible for a while until at some point you start running into supply problems,” he said.
“If the all the Chinese eat 1kg/year more of meat, that means that agriculture has to provide an extra 3-4 million tonnes of maize, wheat and soybean. You can do it for a number of years but then you see the demand curve of the meat industry and the supply curve of the crop industry intersect - and that is when you have price instabilities.”
In the midst of such fundamental changes, Europe’s almost total exclusion of GMOs means it will increasingly struggle to compete in an ever more competitive global agricultural marketplace as its raw material costs go up compared to other regions, said the 53-year-old who has worked for some of the world’s major biotech companies.
He said: “The priorities in food and feed production are safety – and quite rightly nobody wants to compromise on that - and then we want them cheap.
“GM crop producers have very much achieved the feed safety criteria and it is clear by the uptake in the maize and soybean sectors that they create an economic benefit to the farmers. To me the conclusion is clear - if the EU wants to keep those competitive advantages away from European farmers, it will have price consequences.”
He hopes this economic imperative will force a change from the EU and “will keep making the point” that not even EU scientists believe GMOs are unsafe. Hostility to GMOs within the European body is “to a large extent” politically motivated, believes Mr De Greef.
However, the recent announcement that the European Commission is committed to finding a technical solution to its zero tolerance stance on GMOs – which forbids the presence of even the smallest trace of biotech material in EU commodity imports- is good news and “long overdue”.
He said: “We are finally starting to be realistic in the commodity chain discussion that here zero tolerance doesn’t exist. It is simply not compatible with a large scale commodity trading system. The biggest step has been taken - that zero cannot work. It will take a while but we are going to come to a definition of low level presence for approved products. That will give industry the ability to calculate the cost of segregation.”
He explained that the method used to detect the presence of GMOs had improved from 0.1% a decade ago to one part in one million in some cases. In practical terms, this means dust from the shell of GMO soybeans left behind in a ship’s hold could cause an entire shipment of non-GMO soybean to be refused EU entry.
EuropaBio’s position is the world is presently struggling to produce enough food to meet demand in part because the dramatic increases in crop yields following the 1960s’ Green Revolution had flattened out by the 1990s. The best solution, said Mr De Greef, is to increase output by raising yields from existing land, with biotech as part of that solution.
He said: “If we want to provide food, fuel, feed and fibre then clearly we need to increase production and to do that there are only two options; either cultivate more land, which is inherently undesirable because of its impact on biodiversity, conservation etc., or increase yields on a given amount of land.
“And whoever chooses option two, chooses more rapid adoption of modern science and technology - which includes biotech among others. One of the things I dislike hearing is biotech solves or doesn’t solve the problem. Biotech is part of the total technology tool-kit with which we can increase productivity.”
The benefits brought by GM crops depend on those used, he said. Maize brings increased yields and soya decreased production costs. In the US, national average maize yield last year was 9.4 tons/ha, but the average in farm scale testing was almost 50% higher, and the highest yield on commercial farms was 18.7 tons/ha. These figures give some idea of the potential for further productivity gains.
Farmers in northern Argentina using biotech profit because they can grow both soya and wheat in the same year, thereby hugely increasing their yield, he said.
Europe could reap the same benefits, he added but believes the flow of technology has been stifled by the political process within the European Union.
Mr De Greef said: “Trends in cereal yield over the last decade in Europe have been flat. It doesn’t mean we do not have good researchers, it means we must re-establish a plentiful supply at a predictable cost. In order to do that we need to increase the movement of science and technology results from the laboratory to the farm.”
Britain Seeks to Speed up GM Import Approvals
British farm minister Hilary Benn called on Friday for the European Union to speed up the approval process for imports of genetically modified (GM) crops.
Benn told reporters at the Royal Agricultural Show it was important for British livestock farmers to be able to access as many feed sources as possible at a time of rising costs.
"I do want the EU to speed up the process. It is a very important part of helping farmers with some of the challenges they have clearly got," he said.
Genetically modified crops now account for about two-thirds of the world's soy crops, just under 50 percent of cotton, about 25 percent of maize and 20 percent of rapeseed.
There is significant opposition to GM crops in Europe with opponents citing both food safety and environmental concerns.
EU countries rarely agree on anything to do with GM products and their discussions on authorising imports on new modified products often descend into ill-tempered deadlock.
When this happens and the ministers fail to achieve a majority under a complex weighted voting system either to reject or approve the application, EU law provides for the European Commission, the bloc's executive, to issue a default approval.
The prolonged process has ensured approvals have been slow.
Benn said there was no evidence that GM crops were not safe to eat, the key issue for imports.
GM crops needed in Britain, says minister
(The Independent) -- Ministers are preparing to open the way for genetically modified crops to be grown in Britain on the grounds they could help combat the global food crisis.
Ministers have told The Independent that rocketing food prices and food shortages in the world's poorest countries mean the time is right to relax Britain's policy on use of GM crops.
Last night, the Environment minister Phil Woolas held preliminary talks with the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, an umbrella group formed in 2000 to promote the role of biotechnology in agriculture. It is run by representatives from the companies Monsanto, Bayer CropSciences, BASF, Dow AgroSciences, Pioneer (DuPont), and Syngenta.
He said: "There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis. It is a question that we as a nation need to ask ourselves. The debate is already under way. Many people concerned about poverty in the developing world and the environment are wrestling with this issue."
He stressed that the "very robust" procedures for ensuring the safety of experiments would continue, with scientists looking at each application on its merits.
The move will anger environmental groups, who accuse the GM industry of trying to exploit the global crisis to win approval for their products.
GM feed in 90% of imported meat
GM feed varieties which have not been approved in the EU can be found in 90% of meat imported to the EU.
“It is a great irony that we import poultry, pig and beef meat from outside the EU from animals fed on products we deny our own farmers. This helps no-one, consumers have no idea whether their meat has been fed on GM and farmers have to pay through the nose for feed,” said Neil Parish, chairman of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
Parish has asked the Commission to relook and review its GM zero-tolerance standpoint on imported feed.
“I am not suggesting a free for all on GM, but we must ensure that any threshold is fair and achievable for non GM feed. With new varieties of GM soya being planted around the world, it will be virtually impossible to guarantee that any shipment into the EU is truly GM-free. I doubt anyone will bother sending GM-free shipments to the EU as a result and this will make non-GM feed even scarcer and more expensive for our farmers,” said Parish.
Parish has also urged the Commission to speed up its GM approvals process, which is currently lagging years behind the rest of the world - a situation that is placing UK farmers at a huge competitive disadvantage.
Opposition to GM crops must cease - National Beef Assoc
Concerned as much by food price inflation as rocketing feed costs, the National Beef Association has called for pressure groups and EU governments to drop their opposition to GM cropping.
It says "seismic shifts" in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages, and the prospect of declining domestic animal production make it essential that farmers are allowed to use modern technology to grow more food crops on the increasingly limited area of agricultural land that is available.
"Rapid food price inflation is already alarming government and consumers, and the production of both cereals and meat will reduce at the same time as shop prices reach toe curling levels unless GM aids become part of UK and EU farming's routine tool kit," said chairman Duff Burrell.
The NBA points out that just one GM crop, an insect resistant maize planted on just 110,000 hectares, is so far authorised for use within the EU, while a second crop, a blight resistant potato has still to complete its production trials.
Meanwhile huge exporters like the US and Argentina have between them put almost 80 million hectares down to GM crops because they expect them to raise yields and they are now being followed by Brazil and Canada as well as India and China.
"This means that as Europe becomes more reliant on food imports, its consumers will buy more products that contain an increasing proportion of GM ingredient and claims made by uninformed GM opponents that they are able to protect consumers from GM products have already become a joke," said Mr Burrell."
"The European Commission must accept that opposition to GM technology lacks logic and agree that the GM import issue needs an urgent solution because a massive rise in EU and UK livestock feed prices, and a corresponding reduction in livestock population, can only be avoided by quickly clearing the backlog of GM importation approvals."
