Bilbao hosts a forum on Europe’s regulation of transgenic plants in the frame of the Leonardo Grant Program for Researchers and Cultural Creators

On December 1 and 2, 2015 the auditorium of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Bilbao will be the venue for Towards a New Regulatory Framework for the GM Crops in the European Union, a forum exploring the European Commission’s latest proposal for regulating the cultivation of transgenic food crops.

The event has been organized by Leire Escajedo, a tenured professor in the Department of Constitutional law at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and recipient of one of the 2015 Leonardo Grants for Researchers and Cultural Creators, which is also funding the encounter.

For over thirty years, the European Union has been struggling to establish a “functioning” framework – as Leire Escajedo calls it – for the regulation of transgenic crops; so far without success. In what according to this expert would be a “Solomonic decision.” the Commission proposed in March, 2015 to restore competence in the matter to Member States. On October 28, 2015, this third proposal was voted down. The European Parliament ruled that the implementation of this regulatory framework could potentially undermine the common market and cause distrust between consumers and investors.

In Escajedo’s view, this third way, had it been approved, could well have caused an unacceptable competitive disadvantage to the producers of Member States outlawing the cultivation of transgenic crops, who would nonetheless have to compete with transgenic products coming in from abroad. In addition, she continues, the return of competencies would give “the sensation that we are not capable of managing biotechnological innovation in agriculture, when we are doing really well at managing it in biomedicine, with more than 350 million people currently benefitting from treatments obtained through biomedical technology to combat cancer, diabetes and rare diseases, among others.”

As we write, Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Poland and Luxembourg have passed laws against transgenic crops. Spain, conversely, is right now the European country with the greatest land area under cultivation with genetically modified maize. Within Spain, each autonomous region is empowered to decide whether or not to allow GM farming, with the Basque Country, Asturias, the Balearic and Canary Islands and Galicia all showing signs that they are ready to oppose the practice.

The Bilbao meeting will be attended by around thirty experts drawn from a range of disciplines – ethics, philosophy, economics and genetic engineering – from countries including Spain, Norway, the United States and India. Among the professionals taking part are Pere Puigdomech, Director of the Centro de Investigación en Agrigenómica (CRAG) in Barcelona; Matthias Kaiser, President of the European Society for Agriculture and Food Ethics; Pakky Reddy, Executive Director of Agrobiotech Foundation India, and Drew Kershen, an American lawyer specializing in agricultural biotechnology law.

Project of Professor Leire Escajedo

Leire Escajedo (Bilbao, 1973) is a tenured professor in the Department of Constitutional law at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She has also been teaching since 2007 on the UPV/EHU Master’s Program in Food Quality and Security and, since 2012, has belonged to the Executive Committee of European Society for Agriculture and Food Ethics (EurSafe).

Professor Escajedo is among the beneficiaries in the 2015 edition of the Leonardo Grants, with awards going to 63 individual projects from the more than 1,900 submitted in the eleven knowledge areas addressed. Her project, selected in the Law and Social Sciences area, involves a study of the European Union’s regulatory framework on genetically modified organisms.