Védegylet - GMO war in Hungary

"The green movements say 70 to 80 percent of the Hungarian consumers reject GMO’s, however, the multinationals say 74 % of farmers want to grow them. Economists project that 27 000 hectares will be grown in 2007, while politicians hope that the new coegsistence-law would keep the country entirely GMO-free."

Simonyi Bori munkatársunk írása (angolul) a hazai GMO frontról tudósít.

BORI SIMONYI:

Academics contra Deputies – GMO war in Hungary

The GMO issue is one of the toughest challenges facing the dedicated citizen aiming to make informed politicial choices and wanting to be up-to-date in current affairs.

In Hungary, for instance, if you try and seek information in the media you’re likely to get confused by the e extravagant figures and facts flying around in the furious public debate on GMO’s: the green movements say 70 to 80 percent of the Hungarian consumers reject GMO’s, however, the multinationals say 74 % of farmers want to grow them. Economists project that 27 000 hectares will be grown in 2007, while politicians hope that the new coegsistence-law would keep the country entirely GMO-free.

What is the truth, then? – this is what I will try and look into in this article.

Why is it different?

The reason that genetical modification of plants is fundamentally different from the traditional methods of agricultural selection is the fact that genes from different species are mixed. For instance, in several of the so-called first generation GM-varieties (herbicid and insect resistant plants) the immunity against certain parasites is achieved with the help of a gene from a germ, called bacillus thuringiensis that leads to the production of the same toxin in the plant that this bacillus uses to defend itself.

The public image of the biotech industry is that of high-tech, cutting-edge science, who do the same functions like farmers seed selection, only much more effectively, in the spirit of the space-age. However, in reality, the smart-looking laboratories uses a highly instinctive methodology, by which they understand in fact much less what they are doing than with traditional seed selection.

Why is it here?

The EU was forced to lift its GMO-moratory in 2004, after the United States, Argentina and Canada started a process about this in front of the WTO. Presently, the EU has 34 GM-varieties on its list. GMO’s are cultivated in 6 states of the EU 25, like in Spain and Tchech Republic. Five old member states and Hungary have moratories in place for the commercial cultivation of GM crops. These moratories can be applied with reference to new scientific evidence for security risks. However, they are preliminal, the Commission can lift them if the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) finds that the evidence is not well-based. The Hungarian ministry of agriculture and rural development imposed a preliminary moratory for the Mon810 insect resistant maize on 20. January 2005. The reasoning was that when this variety got authorised in the EU, Hungary was not a member yet. With the accession of Hungary, however, a new ecological region, the Carpathian Bassin, (“Pannon Ecological Region”) a sovereign biogeografical region became part of the EU, , for which the patent holder has not conducted the necessary tests. The EFSA’s GM-panel, however, ruled that the evidence wasn’t sufficient. This is problematic, as the GM-panel besides its well known general problems of functioning, is also made up primarily of nutritionist and food safety experts, who were judging ecotoxicoligists’ studies. The scientist group working on this is struggling to provide further evidence to maintain the moratory, these sort of studies, however, by nature take time (one needs several cycles for the tests, etc), of which we are short, also, the patent-holders, after the first unfavourable results stopped providing seeds for the tests… The Commissions motion to lift the Hungarian moratory has been outvoted by more than half of the member states in September 2006. However, the neccessary majority of 2/3 to remove this question from the agenda has not been achieved. Therefore the decision has been postponed. According to Hungarian agricultural minister Jozsef Graf, he has exhausted all diplomatical means and connections to achieve this vote, therefore we cannot expect and further improvement for the next vote that would enable us to reach the 2/3 consensus and thus defend the moratory for good. Even more so, as since the September vote there have been several unfavourable developments in the member states inner politics, like in Germany the anti-GMO Greens came off government, and the new government is likely to vote pro-GMO. Therefore at the new vote in sight the most probably outcome is the repeat of the last result of non-qualified majority at our side. In this case, however, the decisive power returns to the Committee, who will certainly lift the moratory. This is the reason for the widespread political consensus that enabled the parliament to pass the coegsistence law.

The dynamics of the public debate

The „pro” camp

The reasoning of Dénes Dudits, head of the pro-GMO camp, appeals to the traditional image of the small country as scientific giant, where biotechnological research and development could turn Hungarian agriculture a regional leader in the new technology. There is a noticable change in their argumentation recently, stressing that it would be the energetical sector that could make the most use of the new technology, thus providing an answer to the worrying structural surpluses of the Hungarian cereal sector in view of the future CAP reforms. This communication strategy single-handedly does away with the consumer-resistance argument, saying consumers of energy have really no business defining what the product comes from. You don’t have to eat it, and its even environmentally friendly, this sector is high added value, and it would create high quality, knowledge-intensive jobs on the countryside - an argumentation that, even though is questioned by the countercamp, is nevertheless hard to fight in Dudits’s home university town Szeged, regional center of the unemployment-stricken, underdeveloped south-eastern part of Hungary.

The countercamp

There’s a political consensus against GMO’s, which the minister of agriculture proudly regards as his personal success of persuading the prime minister that GMO’s are not in the country’s interest. Beyond all the 5 parties in the parliament, the countercamp consists of consumers and environmental organisations and the groups of the smaller and organic farmers. According to farmers’ reasoning, the GMO-free status of the country ensures a superior price in Hungary’s primary export markets. The coegsistence, which is, according to scientific evidence, unsustainable on the medium to long run, would instantly lead to loss of markets and would require the doubling up of all transformation and transport infrastructure in the maize sector, which would put extra burden on Hungarian agriculture. Consumers and environmentalists, along with some leading scientists from the fields of nutritional and ecological sciences, join this camp as they can only see unneccessary risks of this technology, which are not conterweighed by any advantage else then profit of the patentholders.

Divided public debate

A real public debate is a long time revendication of social movements on such issues, where citizens need to take informed action about things which experts like to contextualise as a tehcnical problem for which you need to be an expert to be mandated to participate in the debate. The open day organised by the agricultural comittee of the parliament a day before the vote, with 600 participants, 7 hours of 28 speakers from all sides of the stakeholders, including scientists from several fields, farmers groups, NGO’s, authorities, patent holders, etc. could have been a real opportunity for such a debate. However, the pro-GMO camp, despite having been invited by the organisers, has not appeared. None of the knowingly pro-GMO academics appeared, and out of the 28 speakers only the representative of Monsanto and of Mosz took a pro-GMO stance. Instead, there has been an exclusive forum at the Academy of Science, where only pro-GMO scientists were invited to speak up. A day before the voting, 37 members of the Academy published an open letter to MP’s reclaiming the “freedom of research” and criticising the coegsistence law project which is “the strictest in Europe”.

Coegsistence: impossible?

The law, as any compromise, is criticised from both sides. Amongst a number of other causes for concern, the separation of GM and conventional and organic produce has 2 critical points: The size of buffer zones have been a center of debates: the final measure contains a 400-metres distance. Originally, they wanted to make it 800 metres and prohibit GMO’s in the Natura 2000 areas, but this was rejected in Brussels. The numbers regarding how much is enough, are extravagantly different. – you can hear anything from 20 metres to 4 kms. But even if all this was solved, the post-harvest treatment would certainly lead to contamination and mixing of produce, due to human negligence. To avoid this, the doubling up of infrastructure (separate harvest machinery, storage, transport, transformation, packaging…) needed to ensure coegsistence is such an extra cost for the agriculture of a country that gives up its GMO free status, that it makes the economical viability highly questionable. Therefore this is quite probably not going to happen, so all signs lead to the forecast expressed by László Heszky on the GMO day int he Parliament: life itself will solve the problem of coegsistence within 10 years: as it happened int he USA, where the ratio of the GM-production (ie the fields which no longer qualified as GM-free) reached the critical 30-40 percent, from which it made no longer sense to differentiate between GM and conventional.

Exclusion of small farmers from the new technology?

The two caracteristic groups of the pro-GMO camp, the academics interested in conducting research for multinationals and the big farmers group both claim the right to choose, the freedom of choice that is denied to them by the law which explicitly states as its aim to maintain the GMO-free status of the country. The multinationals and one of the three farmers trade groups argue that the strict regulations of the law (400 metres buffer zone, extensive administrative burden, consent of neighbours within the buffer zone) for which there’s no European precedent, menace the liberty of choice in the agricultural technology for farmers, excluding especially smallholders from this new technology. In the light of this argument it is interesting to note that MOSZ regroups the largest and most “competitive” farms, most of whom have no trouble to designate the buffer zone within their own area so that they don’t have to ask the consent of anyone. On the other hand, Magosz which have characteristically more smallholders among their members take a clear anti-GMO stance and press for an even stricter law.

Now what?

The five parties in the parliament submitted the regulation proposal together. The declared aim of the law is to maintain the competition advantage held by the GM-free status of the country. The final version has been voted last Monday, with the abstention of the opposition. The reason for this was the fact that the law proposal was already a compromise that for the opponents or GMO’s wasn’t strict enough, but the notification process in Brussels molded it into During the voting process some amendments have been accepted in a 5 parties-consensus. Some more radical amendments submitted by the opposition (defining personalities the deputies coming from the election alliance of Magosz with the big right wing conservative opposition party) were, however, rejected by the government. Their reasoning was that if the finally accepted law turns out significantly stricter then the one notified in Brussels, it might have to restart the notification process, which would certainly prolong the lawmaking period, possibly leaving Hungary without a forceful coegsistence law at the time of the spring seeding works. If in the meantime the moratory is lifted, that could have the catastrophical situation that GMO’s can be grown with no strict regulation. In this case it would be the government’s political responsability. There has been, however, a 5-party consensus for a resolution requiring the government to adopt a clear strategy concerning its agricultural and food production application of GMO’s. It requires the government to pursue the ecological impact studies for the MON810 maize, launch new ones for the varieties that are currently under authorisation process int he EU. It also demands that the government uses all diplomatical and legal means in order to be able to keep the moratory, even in case of an unfavourable decision of the Comission, and that it examines the possibilities of a new moratory under the safeguard close proccess. The pro-GMO camp feels that in the present European context this was the most that could be achieved, it was more the European political environment that imposed limits. Therefore, it is essential to reinforce the resolution that the government does what it can on the European level, forging alliances with other member states, using the means and ways ont he Brussels playing field and lobby processes that exist. After all, the EU is made up of member states…it remains to be seen, to which extent states can exert influence bottom-up in this process, as these strings of intertwined interests lead far up, to the WTO, to the global bargaining that Europe has been making on agriculture and services for global competitivity.