EU steps up efforts to enforce GMO rules in new Member States

Environmentalists and consumer organisations have long voiced fears that lax enforcement of GMO rules in the new Member States might result in the spread of unauthorised or unlabelled GM products across the enlarged common market. Some of the new Member States have grown GM crops for some time without having adequate testing facilities. While all the newcomers have now transposed EU GMO legislation into national law, most of the countries lack the means to properly implement and enforce the authorisation and labelling rules.

Acknowledging this problem, the Commission has been helping the new countries to set up GM enforcement laboratories. On 29 April 2004, 24 national laboratories from the new Member States became part of the European Network of GMO Laboratories (ENGL) with the aim of providing a reliable GMO detection system across the enlarged EU. The network will assist the Commission's Joint Research Centre in establishing a harmonised system for tracing GMOs and in enforcing the new labelling rules that came into force on 18 April 2004 (see

Environmentalists have welcomed this new development. "Laboratories play an important role in implementation and enforcement efforts, so any support of their work is a step in the right direction," Geert Ritsema, European GMO Campaign Co-ordinator of Friends of the Earth, told EurActiv. However, Mr Ritsema also pointed out that more needs to be done to enforce GM labelling rules. "There need to be structures to sanction companies who import GM products without a licence. In Poland for instance, a soy product was found to contain 4 per cent GM soybeans, without any authorisation or labelling. When the authorities were alerted, nothing was done about it."