Hungarian officials enforcing the country's ban on genetically modified crops have destroyed 400 hectares of the controversial plants.  

Russian news organisation Russia Today reported that the Hungarian officials were enforcing a law passed in March this year, though it is not the first time government agents have destroyed GM maize in the country; in 2011, officials ploughed under around 1,000 hectares of maize found to be from GM seeds.

According to Spanish farm union Amigos de la Tierra "90 percent of Europe's GM crops are concentrated in Spain, while [several EU] countries… have banned such cultivations, citing a number of important unresolved questions of the effects of transgenic crops on health and the natural environment."

Monsanto's MON810 maize, sold as Yieldgard, is currently the only GM crop licensed for commercial cultivation in the EU. However, eleven of the bloc's 27 member states have banned the crop. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Greece, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Hungary and Austria have all introduced bans on cultivation.

The EU Commission has tried on numerous occasions to strong-arm Hungary, along with a number of other states, into lifting their national bans on GM crops, but so far its success has been limited.  Although the UK government is fiercely pro-GM, consumers in the country and throughout Europe are openly hostile to the technology and scientific opinion is divided over the crops' usefulness.

Only one other GM crop has been licensed for cultivation in the EU since MON810 in 1998; BASF's Amflora Potato was approved for industrial use in 2010, but due to a lack of acceptance, BASF withdrew the potato two years later and moved its biotech research operations to the United States.