Government: Hungary remains GMO-free – UPDATE

The Hungarian government is not planning to change its strategy of keeping the country’s agriculture free of GMOs, the agriculture ministry said on Thursday, noting that the European Union had started negotiations on the regulation of new genetic technologies (NGT).

According to a draft published by the European Commission last week, produce created using NGT would fall into two categories, the first of which would no longer be governed by current GMO regulations, the ministry said, adding that in the absence of any prior risk assessment, labelling or monitoring, organisms may enter the environment. As for the second category, licensing procedures would be made much easier, “with far less data and impact analyses than that which apply to existing GMO“. Moreover, in the case of some organisms, “follow up would be absent and any harmful effects would never be assessed.”

Under the proposal, member states would not have the right to decide if they want to allow the farming of such produce on their territory, the ministry said. “This is an especially sensitive issue for Hungary, because the EU’s GMO directive was modified in 2015 … so as to make it possible for member states to decide if they want to grow GMO or not…” “The current proposal would strip members of that achievement,” the statement said.

GMO is risky

The statement said that the government supports the research into new gene technologies such as genetic editing in research institutes or universities as those activities would contribute to developments and greater competitiveness. Using such technologies in closed systems eliminate environmental and health risks, it said, while such farming technologies would entail risks that “must be assessed before such a product is marketed”.

“Once there is a harmful effect … it is too late to act because those organisms cannot be withdrawn from the environment,” the ministry said, adding that “regulation of activities concerning such organisms is indispensable”. Hungary advocates prudence and will not support any initiative through which such products could be distributed without prior health and environmental risk assessment in the EU, the statement said.

Ensuring the food supply and food security, as well as protection to traditional and ecological farming, are high priorities, the statement said, adding that the final decree should stipulate that NGT products are adequately marked, monitored, and could be excluded from ecological farming. Mandatory product marking would also ensure the consumer’s right to make a free choice, the ministry said.

UPDATE

Hungary’s opposition to new genomic techniques does farmers and consumers a disservice

By Bill Wirtz

The European Commission recently announced new legislation that will structurally grant authorisation for cultivating gene-edited plants in the EU. Until this day, so-called NGTs (new genomic techniques), despite having been discovered by a prominent European scientist, could not be used on European farmers because of outdated legislation dating back to 2001. However, an alliance of Green parties in the European Parliament, as well as both Hungary and Austria, are set to oppose this authorisation.

In a communiqué dating back to July, the Hungarian government clarified its intentions: “The GMO-free domestic strategy will therefore not change. Negotiations at the European Union level have begun, where our country continues to stand up for what is defined in the Basic Law, i.e. the GMO-free Hungarian agriculture.” The wording of the entire statement is ill-advised, not merely because it was released just a little over a week after the Commission announcement. It is hardly giving the government in Budapest enough time to consider the scientific literature associated with the issue. More importantly, the government is advertently correct when it says that Hungary will remain GMO-free, because NGTs are not GMOs.

What is commonly referred to as GMOs (the term is not really a scientific one because it is too broad to be correctly defined) are transgenic crops, meaning the transfer of a small amount of genetic material from across other species to improve the characteristics of a crop. An example of a “GMO” is BT maize – by introducing a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, this maize variety manages to fend off insects that are likely to destroy the crops, such as the European corn borer. Spain and Portugal have successfully cultivated BT maize for the past 20 years, and none of the horror scenarios painted before its introduction has come true.