Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-07-05-Speech-2-065-000"
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"en.20110705.6.2-065-000"2
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Mr President, you are correct, this is an important report because our fellow citizens attach a great deal of importance to this subject.
Finally, we think it is essential to make it obligatory to develop coexistence measures. At the very least, if a country wishes to authorise the cultivation of GMOs, it should take the measures necessary to protect other sectors.
The Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety passed a satisfactory report, but it was necessary to move towards compromise solutions to make the vote in plenary possible. I am very disappointed by the position taken by the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and by its rapporteur, because we were actually very close in our positions and yet we could not find a compromise solution.
The amendments tabled on behalf of my group, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, are compromise amendments which, I hope, will manage to obtain the support of all groups, and even from the majority of the PPE Group. These are amendments which, I think, are a fair compromise between the need to respond to the wishes of Europeans and of the Commission and the need, at the same time, to maintain a centralised system without actually dismantling the single market. The important thing, however, is actually to allow Member States, the regions and the citizens, if they wish to do so, to act as they see fit.
We have said much this morning about democracy. The report that has been submitted to you here is indeed orientated towards European democracy. We cannot act as if we do not know what our fellow citizens want. We must do this through the law, taking into account the relevant economic, health and environmental requirements. Furthermore, the demand for democracy is a fundamental imperative for all of us as MEPs.
First and foremost, I would like to give my very warm thanks to the shadow rapporteurs, who were enormously helpful to me in the drafting of this report.
The aim of the Commission’s proposal is to permit Member States, if they wish to do so, to prohibit the cultivation of all or some genetically modified organisms (GMOs) within their territory. The initial proposal did not establish any kind of grounds on which that could be permitted, and this led to a number of criticisms from a legal point of view.
It has therefore been my objective to define common rules at European level which will enable us to supervise the opt-out process. Some subsidiarity is required, but we really must supervise the process in such a way as not to unravel the Community policies that we have had so much trouble introducing. However, this is also about responding to the wishes of the Member States, the various regions in Europe and the even larger number of citizens who do not want to allow the cultivation of GMOs to develop within their own territory.
We have therefore established three categories of grounds which could allow the cultivation of GMOs to be prohibited. The first grounds, on which all the groups are in agreement, are environmental grounds supplementing those that are evaluated at European level. They supplement them because they deal with local or systemic aspects of the use of GMOs in a given agronomic context. One example of this is the resistance of weeds to pesticides used with GMOs.
The second category of grounds has to do with socio-economic impact. Should we not know and take into account the cost of contamination, or of measures that need to be taken to control it, for conventional and organic farmers?
Finally, there are grounds associated with land use and with town and country planning.
While we are very much aware how important it is to give full effect to the environmental decision voted on by the Council in December 2008, which calls for the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to have better expertise on GMOs, we would like to maintain centralised management while leaving the Member States some room for manoeuvre. This of course implies that EFSA must improve its work in managing conflicts of interest within the GMO panel and in risk evaluation.
Secondly, we are proposing a change of the legal basis, namely replacing Article 114 with Article 192, which is designed to secure the measures taken by the various Member States. The objective here is to avoid leading the Member States into decisions that they could not later defend in good conditions before the courts, should they be taken there by producers of GMOs."@en1
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