Europe Deadlocked Over Genetically Modified Crops

Call it Europe’s hottest potato.

The Amflora potato looks like any garden-variety spud, but it has been genetically modified by the German chemical giant BASF to be unusually rich in starch. It has also aroused concerns that sick people and the elderly could become more vulnerable to disease, the fear being that a gene in the potato could trigger resistance in humans to certain antibiotics.

"We should keep trying to prevent dissemination of antibiotic resistance rather than allow products into the food chain that could potentially make a bad situation even worse," said Patrice Courvalin, the head of the Antibacterial Agents Unit at the Institut Pasteur, a medical research center in Paris.

EU governments are touchy about the potato, too.

On Monday, European Union farm ministers fell short of a consensus agreement to allow imports of five genetically modified products, paving the way for approval by default, Reuters reported EU officials as saying.

One of the products was the BASF potato, and the others were three insect-resistant GMO corn types from Monsanto and one from Syngenta, the agency reported.

The applications now return to the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, most probably to receive approval for the EU, possibly within a few weeks.

Even then, though, EU countries can invoke so-called safeguard clauses to block the cultivation or sale of gene-altered crops.

The case of the high-tech potato exposes a deepening rift between those Europeans who say that gene-altered products are a boon to farmers and to industry, and those who say that the technology is potentially hazardous to humans and could pose dangers to the environment.

Officials at the European Commission have already deemed the potato safe. These officials want to introduce more gene-altered products into the European Union to normalize trade relations with countries like the United States, and to lower costs for farmers.

But many governments in Europe are extremely wary of distrust among citizens who consider gene-altered products to be "Frankenfoods." Experts say that some may even be hardening their opposition to the technology.

"The debate in Europe appears to be heading toward stalemate," said Jacqueline Mailly, senior European regulatory affairs adviser at the law firm Hogan & Hartson in Brussels. "If you take the Austrians, for example, they now appear to be standing firmer than ever against biotechnology."

Mailly said countries like Austria that originally opposed gene- altered products on principle and for scientific reasons were now backing traditional farmers and producers of organic food, who saw gene-altered crops as a threat.

BASF developed the Amflora potato to yield large quantities of starch suitable for making glossy paper products and for feeding animals.

To develop the potato, BASF worked jointly with the European starch industry, which was seeking to improve its competitiveness. The license fees for the potato eventually could earn BASF up to euro 30 million, or $44 million, annually if it is allowed onto the European market, said Susanne Benner, a spokeswoman for the company. Amflora had never been planted commercially, she said.

BASF included the marker gene during development of the potato as a way of identifying plant cells that successfully produced the desired starch.

EU officials recommended putting the potato onto the market after the European Food Safety Authority, an agency in Parma, Italy, that reports to the European Commission on food safety issues, said that antibiotics affected by the marker gene – kanamycin and neomycin – had none, or only a minor relevance to medicine.

On Friday, Mireille Thom, a European Commission spokeswoman, reiterated that the "potato does not pose a problem to human or animal health or to the environment." But scientists like Courvalin and the environmental group Greenpeace said that the EU and the food safety authority were badly out of step with other health bodies.

They pointed out that the World Health Organization in 2005 classified the antibiotics affected by the marker gene as "critically important" and that last year the European Medicines Agency, a regulatory agency for medicines based in London and also known as EMEA, said that classifying the antibiotics "as of no or only minor therapeutic relevance" was wrong.

Courvalin said he was concerned that if the gene passed to bacteria in the environment or in the intestines of animals that ate the potato and then evolved, antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains could appear with the potential to have a negative effect on human and animal health.

Courvalin said that it had not yet been proven that such genes from genetically modified organisms could transfer to human bacteria, but he stressed that lack of evidence did not mean it would not happen.

He said environmental and intestinal bacteria could cause infections in a growing portion of the population, including people having surgery, those with AIDS, those being treated with chemotherapy and the elderly.

The biotechnology industry, which insists that its products are as safe as nonaltered counterparts, has been frustrated by delays in approving such products that cost it time and money, and block access to European markets.

Companies like BASF and Syngenta, based in Switzerland, say that an unfavorable political climate for gene-altered technologies is hindering the introduction of products that could make the region more competitive.

"Biotech crops are grown on nearly 10 percent of the world’s arable land," Stefan Marcinowski, a member of the board at BASF, said last week. "Only Europe is increasingly lagging behind."

The United States and Argentina have strongly backed the gene- altered industry by bringing complaints against Europe at the World Trade Organization – one factor that pushed EU officials to seek a way to make it easier to market biotech crops and foods in Europe.

Some farmers and meat producers also are pushing EU officials to back the technology as population demands, land scarcity and drought drive up the price of animal feed on global markets.