EU court overturns GM potato approval
Print Edition
Europe’s second-highest court has overturned a decision by the European Commission to allow the cultivation and sale of a potato developed by German chemicals group BASF.
The General Court of the European Union said yesterday that the Commission had failed to follow the bloc’s rules when approving the Amflora potato, which is genetically modified to produce extra starch for use in the paper industry.
While Amflora is no longer grown in Europe — BASF withdrew the product in 2012, citing opposition to the technology — the ruling may raise new concerns about the EU’s complex and much-criticized approval system for GM crops.
It could also delay a decision on a separate Commission proposal to approve cultivation of a new type of modified maize developed jointly by DuPont and Dow Chemical.
“Because the Commission significantly failed to fulfill its procedural obligations, the General Court has annulled the connected decisions,” the court said, referring to the Commission’s approvals for both cultivation and sale of Amflora.
A Commission spokesman said the EU executive was analyzing the ruling.
“The follow-up which the Commission could take would be to appeal on a point of law, but I can’t respond to you now because lawyers are still looking at the judgment,” Commission health spokesman Frederic Vincent told a regular news briefing.
Environmental campaigners welcomed the ruling, and said the Commission had no choice but to withdraw its cultivation proposal for the new type of GM maize, known as 1507, or face a similar outcome.
“Today’s legal judgment demolishes the Commission plans to rush through the approval of Pioneer-DuPont’s GM maize 1507 for cultivation,” Marco Contiero, Greenpeace’s EU agriculture policy director, said in a statement.
Currently, only one GM crop is grown commercially in Europe — an insect-resistant maize developed by Monsanto. It is sown on about 100,000 hectares of farmland, mainly in Spain.
That level is dwarfed by an estimated 170 million hectares of GM crop cultivation globally, mainly in the Americas and parts of Asia.
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