Advanta Seeds UK slams lack of European law on GM crops

LONDON (Reuters) -- Advanta Seeds UK, which sold GM-contaminated oilseed rape to farmers in Britain this year, criticized British and European authorities on Tuesday for failing to set legal guidelines on seed purity.

The company, testifying before a British parliamentary agriculture committee, said it was impossible to guarantee that seeds were totally free of genetically modified (GM) traces.

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"It is a matter of serious regret that these issues, which industry has warned about for some time, have not been adequately addressed by the regulatory authorities to date," Advanta said in a written statement.

"At a minimum, thresholds for accidental GM impurity need to be set, standard testing methods need to be stipulated and results should be analyzed by an approved and consistent statistical method."

In April, Advanta -- part of a 50-50 joint venture between Anglo-Swedish group AstraZeneca Plc and Dutch cooperative Cosun -- told British authorities it inadvertently sold GM-contaminated rapeseed to British farmers.

Britain, where 4,700 hectares of fields had been sown with the contaminated crop, was worst hit but farmers in Sweden, Germany and France were also affected.

The revelation caused an outcry from environmentalists demanding a ban on trials of GM crops in Britain and fueled public skepticism over the potential benefits of the plants dubbed "Frankenstein Foods."

Advanta insisted the crop posed no environmental danger and said that if clear laws had existed setting maximum contamination levels it would have allowed better understanding of the issue and "averted further media hysteria."

The company said it urged the British government on June 1, two weeks after the contamination was publicly revealed, to take swift action.

"It is lamentable, with harvest of winter oilseed rape only days away and planting of the new crop starting at the beginning of August, that regulatory guidance is still non-existent," the company said.

It said the incident also betrayed a "lack of understanding of the basics of agriculture" in some quarters of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and most parts of the media.

Agriculture Minister Baroness Hayman said no demands for regulation had been made directly to the British government.

"I have no record whatsoever of the seed industry approaching the UK government about issues of setting thresholds," Hayman told the agriculture committee.

"With 20/20 hindsight we should perhaps have been addressing the issue earlier."

But she added that the question needed to be tackled at a European, not national, level.

Hayman said she hoped European Union legislation could be in place by the end of the year which would limit impurity to 0.5 percent where the contamination came from EU-approved GM crops.

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