More Than Half of EU Countries to Ban GM Crops

Under a new 2015 law allowing each country within the EU to opt out of the cultivation of genetically modified crops, more than half of the 28 member countries plan to prohibit the production of a group of genetically modified crops currently awaiting EU regulatory approval.

To date, nineteen countries in the bloc have declared that all or part of their territory be eliminated from any cultivation of eight GMO’s currently awaiting pending regulatory approval, including Monsanto Company’s MON810 corn variety, which was granted approval in 1998 and is the only GM crop being grown commercially in the EU.

The countries that have opted to remove themselves from the European GMO market are Belgium (regarding the Wallonia region), Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the UK (on behalf of Scotland, Wales and Ireland) according to the European Commission.

“As the number of requests from member states shows, national governments are now using this legislation to have a greater say on cultivation on their respective territories,” Bloomberg reports the commission said in a statement on Sunday.

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