Croatia wants to establish a region where the use of GMO seeds would be banned

Member of the European Parliament Marijana Petir, as part of the program of the 12th Mediterranean Fair of Healthy Food, Medicinal Herbs and Green Entrepreneurship, held from 26 to 29 March 2015 in Dubrovnik, gave a lecture on the topic „Alpe-Adria – a GMO-free region".

- As I often say, wind and bees do not know state borders. If we want security, we must act together with our European partners and friends. That is why, during my parliamentary term as Chair of the Environment Committee of the Croatian Parliament, I launched an initiative to declare the Alpe-Adria region a GMO-free area. Unfortunately, that initiative did not receive the necessary political support in the Croatian Parliament at the time to be voted on at the plenary session because we were at the end of the term, and the next political leadership never put it on the agenda again - said Petir.

After being elected to the European Parliament based on 43,000 votes from Croatian citizens, Marijana Petir formalized this initiative and sent it in October 2014 to members of the European Parliament from the countries of the Alpe-Adria region (Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, and Italy). So far, she has received support from all Slovenian MEPs, most Croatian and Hungarian MEPs, as well as MEPs from Austria and Italy, from all represented parliamentary groups, which, as she concluded, is a good sign since this issue is not related to party politics but is a matter of personal morality and conscience.

Continuing her lecture in Dubrovnik, Petir warned that at the beginning of this year, the European Parliament adopted a new Directive which "supposedly" gives member states the right to independently decide whether to allow the sowing of GM seeds on their territory. However, as she explained, this Directive does not fully protect the right of member states, their regions, and local authorities to make a completely independent and autonomous political choice, but rather conditions that right.

Additionally, the member state is deprived of the right to full risk management, being required to restrict the introduction of GMOs only on the basis of arguments (political decisions) that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has not approved. In this way, if something goes wrong, all costs of environmental remediation are borne by the farmer who used the approved GM variety, or the costs of damage removal are borne by the state. Neither the GMO producer, i.e., the multinational company, nor the one conducting the risk assessment (the EU through EFSA) bears the damage.

- The threat of GMOs is not an imaginary threat dealt with exclusively by eco-activists. GMOs bring with them a whole range of issues that need to be considered before making a serious decision. Once a decision is made, there is no turning back. The behavior of GMOs in the environment cannot be predicted in all segments of the complexity of interaction with other factors in the environment.

Certain protective mechanisms may not function in every environment in the same way. The process of approving GMO seeds is long and complex, and the damage from introducing GMOs into the environment, along with all accompanying agro-technical means and measures, to biodiversity and conventional, and especially organic agriculture, is unpredictable - said Petir.