January 25, 2012

 

Monsanto will not sell GM corn in France

 

 

For a fifth season, Monsanto will not sell genetically modified (GM) corn seed in France, amid a product ban being ruled illegal.

 

The seed giant said on Tuesday (Jan 24) that it will maintain a stop on sales in France, imposed since 2008, of its MON180 corn variety, one of only two biotech crops cleared for planting in the EU.

 

The decision follows protests anti-GM campaigners at Monsanto sites in France this week, and a government pledge to maintain ban MON180, even though this position has been ruled illegal by Paris and European courts.

 

"I continue to oppose cultivation of Monsanto 810 on French soil," Bruno Le Maire, the French agriculture minister, said last week.

 

A Monsanto spokesman said that the company has "many farmers who support this technology over the border in Spain", where more than 80,000 hectares was sown last year.

 

But if the environment was not receptive to the seed, Monsanto would not "try to chase that market". There were other countries where use of the technology was growing fast.

 

The decision prevents Monsanto from exploiting its monopoly, as the seller of the only biotech corn approved for growing in the EU, in the region's top grower of the grain.  

 

French farmers typically produce nearly one-quarter of the EU corn crop, and achieved a harvest of 15.6 million tonnes, out of a regional total of 64.3 million tonnes, last year, on USDA estimates.

 

And many had been hoping to renew seedings of MON180, of which they sowed more than 22,000 hectares in 2007, before the government ban, near four time the area a year before, if a small portion of total sowings of nearly 1.5 million hectares.

 

USDA staff stationed in Paris said on Friday that, in France, it was "now possible that some biotech cotton will be planted in 2012, and its cultivation is currently legal since the lift of the ban in November and until any other ban is imposed. A number of individual farmers increasingly and publicly express their willingness to grow this product again. They are not only willing to take this opportunity to increase their competitiveness and the quality of their crop, but also as a symbolic action towards the groups of activists who destroyed a number of their corn fields in the past."

 

Some French scientists have also fought the corner of GM technology, achieving coverage in leading newspapers such as Los Echos and Le Figaro.

 

However, fears for, as yet unquantified, environmental damage from biotech crops runs high in many European countries.

 

Last week, German-based BASF - the group behind the Amflora starch potato, the other GM crop cleared for production in the EU pulled out of biotech development in Europe, relocating this business to the US.