Following the departure of former European Health commissioner John Dalli, anti-GM campaigners hope the Commission could toughen its stance on genetically modified crops.

image expired

Dalli, a staunch advocate of GM technologies, stepped aside last month after an anti-fraud inquiry linked him to industry attempts to influence EU tobacco legislation through bribery. He has been temporarily replaced in his role by Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic.

Since Dalli's departure, the Commission has frozen requests to authorise 26 varieties of GM seed for cultivation. Currently only one such seed is licensed for commercial growing in the EU, and attempts to negotiate the legalisation of others have repeatedly stalled in the European parliament, where opinions over GM are polarised.

The authorisation of so many new GM crops had sparked a reaction from Environmental campaigners in Europe. On Wednesday 7th November, Greenpeace campaigners demonstrated outside Commission buildings in Brussels, highlighting the results of a study which found cultivation of GM crops led to increased pesticide use. 

Of the 26 new crops awaiting authorisation, 19 have been engineered to be resistant to pesticide applications.

Campaign groups have called for more publicly-funded research into GM crops, to establish whether or not they pose a threat to the environment or consumers. They have also called for a reshuffle of the European Food Safety Authority, Europe’s food safety watchdog, which has been subject to allegations of conflicts of interest and proximity with big business.

Investigative organisations Corporate Europe Observatory and Earth Open Source revealed earlier this year that EFSA reviews over feature "frequent conflicts of interest" and suggested that "Too often it’s not independent science that underlies EFSA decisions about our food safety, but industry data."

Tweet