Europe: Poland’s latest proposal on GMOs/NGTs ignores farmers’ rights
On the 19th of February, Poland presented a new “improved” proposal to the Council of the EU on the deregulation of so-called “new” plant GMOs obtained by new genomic techniques (NGTs). European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) has welcomed the importance given to the issue of patents, which are the main concern of farmers, but the solutions proposed by Poland will not be able to solve it.
In this third proposal presented by Poland since the beginning of its presidency, the provisions on the review procedure and transparency of patents introduced in the January proposal are made optional or declaratory only, further weakening a text that already failed to address farmers’ concerns.
Beyond this unacceptable risk of widespread biopiracy of all conventional seeds by a few multinational corporations – the only ones with the technical and legal capacity to produce and market these “new” GMOs – Poland also does not challenge the Commission’s suppression of health and environmental assessments and consumer labeling. It also does not question the impossibility of post-marketing monitoring and withdrawing these GMOs from the market in case of post-marketing health or environmental damage, an impossibility resulting from the lack of published methods for detecting and identifying these genetically modified plants. This calls into question the precautionary principle and the right of Member States to reject these new GMOs.
ECVC has called on the Member States of the European Union to reject this new proposal, as well as the Commission’s initial proposal, and to maintain the application of Directive 2001/18. It is the only legislation that is fit to guarantee the protection of conventional, peasant and organic agrarian systems, human health, the environment and food sovereignty against the risk of control of the entire food chain by the patents of 4 or 5 multinationals, which already control more than 60% of the world seed market.
For more information on this, visit the ECVC website.