FRENCH AGRICULTURE MULLS GMO LABELLING FOR FOOD
Date: 20-May-99
Country: France
Author: Paule Bonjean
At a workshop this week in Paris hosted by Laboratoires Wolff, an independent group that monitors the quality of agricultural goods, a cross-section of members of French agriculture acknowledged the importance of genetic labelling to respond to the concerns of consumers and environmentalists.
But several obstacles stand in the way of adopting a "non-GMO" network of food, especially the lack of a viable technology to detect GMOs and the cost of segregating GMOs throughout the food chain.
"It's difficult. It's going to take a long time to put in place, but it won't be impossible," said Alain Karleskind, chairman of Laboratoires Wolff.
"Nothing is simple. It must be faultlessly controlled," said Philippe Joudrier, a researcher at INRA, agricultural institute controlled by the French government.
Those present at the workshop proposed that the foods included in the labelling system contain a maximum of about two percent genetically modified substances. To that end, the participants expressed the need to quickly put in place a viable analysis system that would permit labelling.
"The chain (from field to end-product) is very long. It's a bit like putting the plough before the ox in deciding to fix the threshhold at two percent without having viable method of detection," a representative of seed company Limagrain said.
France is expected to plant 500 hectares to genetically modified maize in 1999, down from 1,900 acres last year - the first year it was grown in France, according to Didier Seguin, director of buying at Cerestar. That marks just a tiny fraction of the roughly 1.76 million hectares of maize grown in France.
By comparison, the amount of land to be planted to GMO maize in the United States this year is expected to be about 35 percent of total U.S. maize area, up from 28 percent last year, the National Corn Growers Association has said.
