BRUSSELS: A proposal that Europe’s top environment official made last month to ban the planting of a genetically modified corn strain across the bloc sets the stage for a bitter war within European Union, where politicians have done their best to dance around the issue.

The EU’s environmental commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said he based his decision squarely on scientific studies suggesting that there remain long-term uncertainties and risks in planting the so-called Bt corn. But when the full European Commission takes up the matter in the next couple of months, commissioners will have to decide what mix of science, politics and trade to apply. And they will face the ambiguous limits of science when it is applied to public policy.

For a decade, the European Union has maintained itself as the last major largely GMO-free swath of land left in the world, largely by sidestepping these tough questions; it kept a moratorium on the planting of crops made from genetically modified organisms while making promises of further scientific studies.

But Europe has been under increasing pressure from the World Trade Organization and the United States, which argue that there is plenty of research to show such products do not harm the environment. Therefore, they insist, normal trade rules must apply.

In fact science does not provide a definitive answer to the question of safety, experts say, just as science could not know for sure whether the Year 2000 computer bug would be a problem.

“Science is being utterly abused by all sides for nonscientific purposes,” said Benedikt Haerlin, head of Save Our Seeds, an environmental group in Berlin, and a former member of the European Parliament. “The illusion that science will answer this overburdens it completely.” He added, “It would be helpful if all sides could be frank about their social, political and economic agendas.”

Dimas, a lawyer and the minister from Greece, looked at the advice provided by the European Union’s scientific advisory body – which found that the corn was “unlikely” to pose a risk – but he decided there were nevertheless too many doubts to permit the modified corn.

“Commissioner Dimas has the utmost faith in science,” said Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for the Environment Commission. “But, there are times when diverging scientific views are on the table.” She added that Dimas was acting as a “risk manager.”

Within the European scientific community there are passionate divisions about how to apply the growing body of research concerning genetically modified crops, and in particular the one known as Bt corn, which is based on the naturally occurring soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, a toxin that is genetically inserted in the corn to kill pests. The vast majority of that research is conducted by, or financed by, the companies that make seeds of genetically modified organisms.

“Where everything gets polarized is the interpretation of results and how they might translate into different scenarios for the future,” said Angelika Hilbeck, an ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, whose skeptical scientific work on Bt corn was cited by Dimas. “Is the glass half empty or half full?” she asked.

Hilbeck says that company-funded studies do not devote adequate attention to broad ripple effects that modified plants might cause, like changes to bird species or the effect of all farmers planting a single biotechnology crop. Hilbeck said producers of modified organisms, like Syngenta and Monsanto, have rejected repeated requests to release seeds to researchers like herself to conduct independent studies of the environmental impact of the products.

In his decision, Dimas cited a dozen scientific papers in finding potential hazards in the Bt corn to butterflies and other insects.

Full Story: http://iht.com/articles/2007/12/09/news/gmo.php