The FINANCIAL — Zanda Kalniņa-Lukaševica, the Latvian Foreign Ministry’s Parliamentary Secretary for European Affairs, said that “it is satisfying to see that during the Latvian Presidency the Council of the European Union has approved the new European Union Directive allowing Member States to ban or restrict the cultivation of genetically-modified organisms on their territory”.
This week in Strasbourg, at the plenary session of the European Parliament, Zanda Kalniņa-Lukaševica together with Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament, signed the Directive on Genetically-Modified Organisms (GMOs) approved by the Council of the European Union. The Directive will come into effect 20 days after its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union.
“This is a real achievement at EU level. I myself have worked hard on this while I was chair of the European Affairs Committee at the Latvian Parliament. The new rules provide an opportunity to ban the cultivation of GMOs in Latvia and other countries. As shown by public opinion polls, the majority of people in Latvia are against the use of GMOs,” Zanda Kalniņa-Lukaševica pointed out.
The new Directive gives Member States more flexibility regarding the cultivation of genetically-modified crops under certain conditions at two distinct points in time. The first is during the authorisation procedure when a Member State can ask to amend the geographical scope of the application. Then, after a GMO has been authorised, a Member State may ban or restrict the cultivation of the crop on grounds such as those related to environmental or agricultural policy objectives, or for other reasons such as town and country-planning, land use, socio-economic impacts, co-existence and public policy.
Under the previous rules, Member States could provisionally ban or restrict the use of a GMO on their territory only if they had fresh evidence that the organism concerned constituted a risk to human health or the environment, or in the case of an emergency.
The new rules also lay down that Member States in which GMOs are cultivated must take care to avoid cross-border contamination into neighbouring Member States in which these GMOs are banned. This does not apply if particular geographical conditions make these measures unnecessary.
Each month, items of legislation adopted by the EU Council and the European Parliament are officially signed during the plenary session of the European Parliament. The signing means that this legislation will enter into force soon. A representative of the presidency signs the legal acts on behalf of the Council of the EU.
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