Europe's food industry gives cautious welcome to GM vote

Members of the European Parliament yesterday voted to toughen Europe's stance on the labelling of food products containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). The food industry gave a guarded welcome to the decision not to reduce the threshold level for GM ingredients, but said it remained "deeply concerned"​ about the implications of the labelling issues.

The original draft legislation presented to the European Parliament had called for the maximum tolerance threshold for GM ingredients in food to be set at 0.5 per cent for each ingredient, a move which the food industry feared would be highly restrictive.

But MEPs agreed instead to fix the maximum level at a more reasonable 0.9 per cent - the previous acceptable level was set at 1 per cent - and only foods containing more then this amount of GM material will have to be labelled as such.

The CIAA​ (Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries of the EU), which represents manufacturers across the 15 Member States, said that it was pleased to see that MEPs had decided to maintain what it called "reasonable thresholds"​ for GMOs in food.

But the organisation said it still had its reservations about the tough new rules which extend labelling to all foods produced from GMOs irrespective of whether there is DNA or protein of GM origin in the final product. The food industry will have just six months to comply with the new rules once they have been officially published, and the CIAA said it was "deeply concerned by the practical difficulties the implementation of this legislation will create for operators and for enforcement authorities"​.

In the absence of DNA or GM protein in the final product, the implementation of the new rules will have to be based on paper trails and not on analytical tests, as is the situation today, the CIAA claimed. The organisation fears that this system will lead to unfair competition and fraud while causing major confusion for consumers.

"On the one hand, certain food ingredients containing GM-material below a threshold for adventitious presence will not have to be labelled. On the other hand, GM-derived products which do not contain GM-material will have to be labelled,"​ the CIAA said in a statement, highlighting the central irony of the new legislation.

"The priority will now be to assess practical consequences of today's vote for food business operators and to determine, with national authorities, how they will enforce the new rules."​

MEPs also opposed an amendment to the legislation put forward by the Council of Ministers which would have allowed precise descriptions of mixtures of GMOs in a single product to be replaced by a simple 'declaration of use'. MEPs instead said that pre-packaged products produced from GMOs should be described as such, using the words 'This product is produced from GMOs' on the label and also as part of any display or advertising.

But if Europe's food producers are concerned about the implications of the labelling changes, then manufacturers in the US, where GM foods are much more widespread, are positively furious. With some 80 per cent of US soybeans and 40 per cent of US corn coming from GM variants, American food producers are likely to be the hardest hit by the new rules, which have already been branded as unworkable.

American producers are taking legal action against the EU over its GM stance, claiming that they are losing up to $300 million a year in revenues because of the restrictions. The US has always maintained that GM crops are perfectly safe for human consumption, an argument viewed with much more scepticism by European regulators and consumers alike.