European Parliamentarians are urging the European Commission to draw up legislation that would establish the legal liability of GM food producers for contamination of products by non-biotech manufacturers and growers.
Such legislation, said the parliament’s agriculture committee, should also create rules telling GM companies to secure “insurance in respect of possible financial damage in connection with coexistence” with non-GM producers.
It also recommended that GM product approval procedures should insist that a company could only sell genetically modified foodstuffs if it had sufficient insurance coverage to meet possible compensation claims. These could arise from the contamination of non-GM plants via pollen or a failure to label GM ingredients that subsequently ended up in the food chain.