Report 'hijacked' by GM lobby

The report, by his group colleague Martin Hausling, detailed Europe’s ‘alarming’ dependence, in a time of high energy prices and transport costs, on imported industrialised soy from South America.

Mr Smith, a member of the European Parliament’s Agriculture and Rural Development Committee, said the report, which proposed solutions to help Europe improve its indigenous protein crop production, was hijacked by pro-GM MEPs, who inserted the issue of a low level presence (LLP) threshold for unauthorised GM varieties in imported feed.

As a result, Mr Smith and his colleagues voted against the report, and Mr Hausling removed his name from it.

Mr Smith added: “It’s a real disappointment when solid, uncontroversial reports on important topics get hijacked by vested interests.

“Martin put a lot of good work into this and there was much to approve of, such as encouragement through support schemes of crop rotation involving leguminous plants, the funding of training and extension services to help farmers improve their skills, and the development of decentralised processing facilities for feed.”

He said in contrast, a permanent reliance on industrialised production in South America was just not sustainable in the long run.

“We wanted to keep the GM issue separate from this report, in order to build a broad consensus: GM is being dealt with in other legislative files in the Parliament.

“Unfortunately, the GM lobby scaremongered MEPs into including the LLP issue in this report: a measure which will open the door to contamination of organic and conventional crops across the EU.”

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