On July 25, the European Commission (EC; Brussels, Belgium) adopted a system for labeling and tracing food and feed derived from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While the aim is to address consumer safety fears and prompt the EU's national environment ministers to lift the de facto moratorium on GM crops, the proposals have been widely criticized as unworkable, costly, and prejudiced against biotechnology.

Mindful of the recent Starlink saga in the US (in which a GM crop approved for only feed found its way into the food chain; Nat. Biotechnol., 19, 298, 2001), the commission plans to establish an all-or-nothing approval procedure whereby GMOs must be approved for both food and feed or not at all. This new authorization procedure is the only proposal to have been generally well received.

Also under the new proposals, foods derived from GM ingredients—whether or not they actually contain GM DNA or protein—will have to be labeled as being derived from GMOs, and thus would include such highly refined foods as soya oil and glucose syrup. For the first time, the legislation will also apply to feed.

The EC wants to be able to trace GMOs from farm to fork and aims to set up a system requiring businesses at each stage of the production and distribution chain to record and keep information relating to the origin and movements of GMOs. The EC says this paper trail will “reduce the need for sampling and testing of products.” As well as ensuring accurate labeling, the EC hopes the traceability measure will enable the quick withdrawal of a product should there be any adverse effect on human health.

As a trade concession, the commission has said it is willing to allow up to 1% adventitious presence of authorized GMOs in imported food and feed. Imports into the EU are to be labeled with an open declaration of possible GMOs they might contain. Importers will be required to conduct sampling and testing of unlabeled imports, and the Joint Research Centre of the Commission will be set up as a new Community Reference Laboratory that will have the main task of validating sampling and detection methods.

GM crop approvals were halted three years ago by a group of EU environment ministers bowing to public pressure. Food safety commissioner David Byrne says the new laws “will ensure that the regulatory framework in the EU is up to the high standard consumers expect.” Indeed, Beate Kettliz, food policy advisor for the European consumers' organization Le Bureau Europeen des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC; Brussels, Belgium), says BEUC's reaction to the proposals is “positive.”

However, while the commission panders to European consumers, trade and industry groups are up in arms about the plans. If implemented, says Val Giddings, vice president of food and agriculture at the US Biotechnology Industry Organization (Washington, DC), the proposals will “further erode consumer confidence in European political and regulatory authorities; further inflame transatlantic tensions; and further retard European progress toward transforming agricultural production to a more sustainable, environmentally friendly, and economically successful model such as those emerging everywhere else in the world.”

One of the concerns is that the proposed traceability regime will be hugely expensive to implement in the long, complicated distribution chains. Randall Warin, trade policy manager at the worldwide Grain and Feed Trade Association (GAFTA; London) says it is simply impractical because of the shear volumes of traded commodities.

Another is that the labeling requirements will be practically impossible to police because there is no test sensitive enough to verify samples. While the EC says it will develop technical guidance on sampling and testing methods, GAFTA's Warin notes, “We've talked to quite a few scientists and they've said this legislation is probably 10 years ahead of the analytical methods.”

Even spokespeople from less vociferous groups question the logic. “We are concerned that fraud is much more possible when you are labeling things without being able to test for them,” says Natalie Moll, manager of external and government relations at the EU industry body EuropaBio (Brussels, Belgium). “If you make laws that are so easily side-steppable, then we have to wonder why you are doing it.” Even BEUC's Kettlitz questions the practical application of the proposal to test for the presence of non-authorized GMOs. “How would this happen,” she asks.

Moreover, it is unclear how the labeling and tracing provisions provide improved food safety, as GM crops undergo extensive scientific risk assessment before being placed on the market. And labeling products derived from biotechnology with no GM material present amounts to labeling a process—something the Grocery Manufacturers of America (Washington, DC) says is not consistent with the EU's trade obligations and penalizes countries that have adopted biotechnology. “The proposal establishes a costly, discriminatory and likely prohibitive set of requirements for trade in products of biotechnology without the identification of any health or safety risk to justify such measures,” according to the GMA. “The EC's mandatory labeling requirements targeting methods of food production undermine science-based labeling...and will play havoc with global food trade.”

The European Parliament and Council have now to decide whether to go ahead with the proposals. But as Tony Anderson, chair of the American Soybean Association (St Louis, MO), warns: “If the EU follows through on their promise of accurately testing every [unlabeled] load that comes in, I'll stand by my statement that the EU has bought the last of the grain from outside their country.”