Europe's GM food aversion

German legislators vote this week on a law which would set standards for a 'GM free' label, designed to give consumers a choice on whether to support a technology which they widely distrust. The law has broad support and will probably pass, to the dismay of US trade officials.

Why does Europe continue to overlook GM food and the efficiency gains it promises?

For Europe, GM food came along at just the wrong time.

The process of modifying a food crop under laboratory conditions does not differ radically from the intensive forms of selective breeding that have been practiced for centuries. But the first 'GM' strains hit European shores in 1995-6, just when confidence in government claims about food safety was in tatters, owing to mounting death tolls from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease -- an ailment caught by eating beef that officials said was safe.

The fallout is still felt today. Only one GM crop is presently cultivated in Europe: a form of maize engineered by US firm Monsanto to secrete a protein that kills a maize-eating insect. Austria and Hungary ban the crop, in defiance of the European Commission's efforts to enforce a 2006 WTO ruling that branded their actions illegal.

France has now followed suit. In a move that provoked farmers' ire, but won plaudits from environmentalists, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would defend "the principle of precaution" by disallowing new planting of the seeds.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson finds himself caught between national capitals, which refuse to countenance GM foods on their citizens' dinner plates, and an exasperated United States, which asks why Europeans refuse to stand by international trade rules. Washington could introduce million-dollar retaliatory trade sanctions in early February.

Climate quandary

Europe's aversion to GM food is under pressure from several angles:

• Food prices are soaring, driven by developing world demand, the switch to meat-rich diets and use of agriculture as a ‘bio-fuel’ energy source.
• The most-used GM crops -- herbicide and insect-resistant forms of maize, cotton, soya and rapeseed -- bring big climate benefits, through lower doses of pesticides and fertiliser, and less ploughing. One study says that reduced chemical and tractor fuel use was equivalent to taking 430,000 cars off the road in 2005, and that increased carbon sequestration in earth un-disturbed by ploughing was equivalent to 3.2 million more.
• European livestock farming risks being undercut by foreign rivals which can use plentiful supplies of cheaper grain inputs.
• As the world's largest agricultural import market, Europe's GM rejection gives third-country governments an incentive to keep such crops out of their agricultural sectors. Countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have stopped or slowed their adoption of technologies that could raise output and ultimately be tailored to local problems -- like nutritional deficiencies in staple crops.

But whereas climate change has mellowed public opinion on another hot-button issue -- nuclear power plants -- opposition to GM food is holding steady.  It seems that the continent's well-fed and prosperous consumers will continue to view their respect for wildlife and attachment to local farming traditions as a higher priority than the productivity gains and environmental benefits that agricultural biotech brings.