THE European Union this week effectively lifted its unofficial moratorium on the sale and growth of genetically modified crops, in place since 1998. A GM sweetcorn is expected get approval within weeks.
Europe’s agriculture ministers had their final chance to oppose approval at a meeting in Luxembourg on Monday. They did not take it, which means the European Commission is free to press on with its own original proposal to approve the maize.
“It’s a decision of enormous symbolic significance,” says Markus Payer, a spokesman for Syngenta, the company based in Basle, Switzerland, that developed the sweetcorn. Called Bt-11, the maize has an added gene from a soil bacterium that codes for…
