Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-17-Speech-3-324"
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"en.20031217.12.3-324"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start by thanking the rapporteur, Mr Graefe zu Baringdorf, for genuinely taking the initiative in producing this own-initiative report on coexistence, and for successfully bringing together all points of view in one report. The fact is that opinions on coexistence vary from one country to the next, and even within my group we cannot agree on the subject.
Let us be clear: it was a long time now that the question stopped being about whether we say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to genetic engineering. The rapporteur has said that. That question has long been decided. We need to look ahead and are already discussing how there can be coexistence between GM and non-GM crops, and how to ensure that all parties can operate side by side without anyone being disadvantaged. Coexistence ought to guarantee freedom of choice for farmers and consumers, and clear rules need to be created for the benefit of all European farmers, allowing each to make an independent choice about which different farming methods to use, and ensuring those methods can coexist without generating problems.
After intensive cross-party and internal discussions, the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Affairs has reached a compromise and has approved a report containing specific, clear demands. Our own-initiative report calls for comprehensive regulation at Community level, since the guidelines proposed by the Commission are a collection of non-binding recommendations. We therefore expect the Commission, where policy is determined at Community level, as in the case of agricultural policy, to provide a common regulatory framework.
Another important feature in our report is the call for the Commission to submit a proposal for Community-wide liability and insurance. Provision must be made in advance to cover the possibility of adventitious contamination, rather than simply leaving the farmers to sort it out between themselves, and the devil take the hindmost. There is no way the question of liability should be left to the farmers to resolve.
In addition, GMO contamination in seed must be established using technically viable and accurate threshold values, in order to ensure that agricultural production complies with the existing labelling threshold of 0.9% for food. This subject has already been addressed by Mrs Scheele.
An own-initiative report is one way in which Parliament can send a clear political signal. If we now water down the demands and comments made by the Committee on Agriculture and unwrap the existing package, our demands will no longer be clear. Instead, we will have a hotchpotch of vague statements without any clear shape. As MEPs, we need to ask ourselves whether we really want to send out a political signal with no actual content.
I therefore join the rapporteur in hoping that this own-initiative report will be adopted tomorrow with a genuinely convincing majority, since it has already received so much support in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Affairs."@en1
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