Brusels, Belgium
January 2010

Introduction

All over Europe, farmers are facing difficult times. They are confronted with 4 major challenges:

1. Keeping farming profitable, while production costs are steadily increasing
2. Growing more food in a more sustainable and environmentally friendly way, on the same if not reduced area of land
3. Adapting to the effects of climate change, including less productive land, new plant diseases, higher energy costs and scarcer water supplies
4. Remaining competitive on a global scale, while being deprived of modern methods available to many other farmers worldwide.

Farmers are struggling to meet these combined challenges while also trying to optimise inputs of fuel, fertiliser, pesticides and water. New technologies, such as genetic modification, are helping farmers to respond to these demands. That is why 13.3 million farmers around the world now choose to grow GM crops1 ; making agricultural biotech one of the fastest adopted agricultural innovations ever.

The advantage is clear – 13 years of global GM crop cultivation have demonstrated their benefits.

In all EU Member States, however, farmers are being denied access to the tools necessary to meet the challenges they face, due to the EU’s dysfunctional authorisation process. Some approvals for cultivation of GM crops have been blocked for a decade and the backlog of new approvals increases every year. Today, European farmers only have access to one GM trait in one single crop, and in a number of countries even this is not accessible, due to politically motivated bans or other measures. While these bans have been assessed by the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA) as having no scientific justification, they prevent European farmers from planting the very same GM crops that are harvested each year by their global counterparts – who are reaping the benefits.

Many farmers in the EU would like the choice to use this technology, even in countries where cultivation of GM crops is rendered impossible and where destruction of GM crop trials is widespread. Europe’s political leaders have a responsibility to acknowledge the challenging times farmers face. Political leaders should respond by offering them the freedom to choose the same tools as those available to their global competitors.

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Website: http://www.europabio.org

Published: February 3, 2010