No other regulated product category scores as high as GMOs in terms of number of product application dossiers that: a) cannot be agreed to by a regulatory committee and therefore end up in an Ambassadors’ or Ministers’ vote (100% of the time) and, b) never result in a qualified majority neither in favour nor against (99.9% of the time).
The GM product approval system is the only system in the EU that has a large backlog of products awaiting assessment or voting. This is compelled by the lack of respect for regulatory timelines by authorities, as recognised in Court rulings. Other regulated sectors have had backlogs which have been dealt with –not so with GM.
Why is this? The EU has what’s said to be “the most stringent regulatory system for GMOs in the world”, world class leading scientists making up its Food Safety Authority and officials in charge of processing dossiers through the system.
In the GMO area, a vicious circle of lack of approvals and decreased trust in the technology is being perpetuated, leading to a negative precedent of “politics over science”
Read the full, original article: When politics trumps science: The curious case of the EU’s GMO authorisation system
