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You are in GM Crops and Food → Contamination and Coexistence → Europe and coexistence

Europe and coexistence

The European Commission has published a Recommedation containing guidelines for member states about the kind of rules they may put in place to allow the growing of GM crops alongside non-GM and organic crops. These guidelines set down the labelling threshold of 0.9% as the level of contamination that rules should aim at achieving. This has been controversial because organic systems work to avoid GM all together and the EU's GM Traceability and Labelling rules (see section on EU authorisation) say that 0.9% represents a level that is allowable without labelling only when contamination is accidental or technically unavoidable. A legal opinion from Paul Lasok QC, commissioned by several groups in the UK, has said that the Commission's approach is 'fundamentally flawed' and that the approaches of the Commission (and the UK Government if it follows the Recommendation) have 'no basis in Community legislation and are wrong in law'.

In December 2005, the European Commission published proposals for an allowable accidental GM contamination threshold of 0.9% in organic produce. Current European organic regulations do not allow GM to be used in organic production systems and do not state whether there is any allowable level of contamination.

GeneWatch is pressing for Europe-wide coexistence rules which aim to avoid GM contamination completely and an industry funded compensation scheme for situations were non-GM farmers have economic losses as a result of GM contamination.

Resources

• Links
  • European Commission resource page: Co-existence of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic farming

    Provides links to the key European Commission documents related to coexistence of GM and non-GM crops.

  • Friends of the Earth GMO-free regions campaign

  • GMO-free regions organisation

• Background documents
  • European Commission Report on the implementation of national measures on the coexistence of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic farming

    The European Commission's 2006 review of how member states are implementing the coexistence guidelines. By the end of 2005, coexistence legislation had been adopted in four Member States (Denmark, Germany and Portugal and six of the Austrian Länder) In most of the other Member States, only draft coexistence measures had been developed. In some Member States coexistence legislation is being developed at the regional level. Spain is the only Europen country growing significant areas of GM crops - 58,000 ha in 2004, which was equivalent to about 12% of the area of maize grown in Spain.

  • Letter to European Commission about proposal for organic labelling 25th January 2006
  • Legal Opinion from Paul Lasok QC on European Commission Coexistence Guidelines 1st March 2005
  • Summary of legal advice from Paul Lasok QC on the European Commission's coexistence guidelines 1st March 2005
  • GeneWatch PR: Brussels bureaucrats increase GM conflict by sacrificing organic non-GM standards: 23rd July 2003

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Resources

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• Background documents