GM Watch
  • Main Menu
    • Home
    • News
      • Newsletter subscription
      • Daily Digest
      • News Reviews
      • News Languages
    • Articles
      • GM Myth Makers
      • GM Reports
      • GM Quotes
      • GM Myths
      • Non-GM successes
      • GM Firms
        • Monsanto: a history
        • Monsanto: resources
        • Bayer: a history
        • Bayer: resources
    • Videos
      • Latest Videos
      • Must see videos
      • Cornell videos
      • Agriculture videos
      • Labeling videos
      • Animals videos
      • Corporations videos
      • Corporate takeover videos
      • Contamination videos
      • Latin America videos
      • India videos
      • Asia videos
      • Food safety videos
      • Songs videos
      • Protests videos
      • Biofuel myths videos
      • Index of GM crops and foods
      • Index of speakers
      • Health Effects
    • Contact
    • About
    • Donations
    • How donations will help us
News and comment on genetically modified foods and their associated pesticides    
  • News
    • Latest News
    • Newsletter subscription
    • News Reviews
    • News Languages
      • Notícias em Português
      • Nieuws in het Nederlands
      • Nachrichten in Deutsch
    • Archive
      • 2021 articles
      • 2020 articles
      • 2019 articles
      • 2018 articles
      • 2017 articles
      • 2016 articles
      • 2015 articles
      • 2014 articles
      • 2013 articles
      • 2012 articles
      • 2011 articles
      • 2010 articles
      • 2009 articles
      • 2008 articles
      • 2007 articles
      • 2006 articles
      • 2005 articles
      • 2004 articles
      • 2003 articles
      • 2002 articles
      • 2001 articles
      • 2000 articles
  • Articles
    • GM Myth Makers
    • GM Reports
    • How donations will help us
    • GM Quotes
    • GM Myths
    • Non-GM successes
    • GM Firms
      • Monsanto: a history
      • Monsanto: resources
      • Bayer: a history
      • Bayer: resources
  • Videos
    • Index of speakers
    • Glyphosate Videos
    • Latest Videos
    • Must see videos
    • Health Effects
    • Cornell videos
    • Agriculture videos
    • Labeling videos
    • Animals videos
    • Corporations videos
    • Corporate takeover videos
    • Contamination videos
    • Latin America videos
    • India videos
    • Asia videos
    • Food safety videos
    • Songs videos
    • Protests videos
    • Biofuel myths videos
    • Index of GM crops and foods
  • Contact
  • About
  • Donations
SUBSCRIBE TO REVIEWS

GMWatch Facebook cornfield banner

SCIENCE SUPPORTS REGULATION OF GENE EDITING

Plant tissue cultures

GENE EDITING: UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES AND RISKS

Damaged DNA on fire

GENE-EDITED CROPS & FOODS

Help stop the new threat

GM Fed pig

News Menu

  • Latest News
  • News Reviews
  • Archive
  • Languages

Please support GMWatch

Donations

You can donate via Paypal or credit/debit card.

Some of you have opted to give a regular donation. This is greatly appreciated as it helps place us on a more stable financial basis. Thank you for your support!

2012 articles

MEP slams EFSA bias

  • Print
  • Email
Details
Published: 09 October 2012
Created: 09 October 2012
Last Updated: 22 October 2012
Twitter

MEP slams EFSA bias
Posted by Peter Crosskey
Arc2020
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
http://www.arc2020.eu/front/2012/10/mep-slams-efsa-bias/

Writing in the Nouvel Observateur's Le Plus column over the weekend, MEP Corinne Lepage expressed her surprise at the partiality of the European Food Safety Authority in its unseemly haste to try and discredit the findings of Dr Eric-Gilles Seralini last week. There is a clear conflict of interest when one of the peer reviewers is already a signatory to the EU's current 2003 approval for Nk603 GM maize and is asked to review a damning inditement of this cereal's safety.

Lepage called for EFSA to be rendered fit for purpose: article 23 requires it to provide the public with reliable, objective and comprehensible information. Article 23 also requires EFSA to express its own conclusions in an independent way, which has hardly the case in this instance.

Since the other reviewer was a member of the OECD's Endocrine Disrupters Testing and Assessment task force, he too has a conflict of interests. On September 28, Seralini's publication was the subject of a rapidly convened telephone conference of the EFSA Emerging Risks Unit, which set up an ad hoc panel under EFSA's Director of Scientific Evaluation of Regulated  Products (REPRO) Directorate Per Bergman. According to a Dutch health department account of the meeting, Bergman opened by explaining that their task was to address scientific concerns and avoid divergence.

Among 22 people in the telephone conference, ministry civil servants from four member states were briefed by a battery of EFSA officials. The member states were Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

At one point a Belgian official volunteered to write a stiff complaint to the academic publisher handling Seralini's publication. The zealot had to be dissuaded on the grounds that "the scientific community" had already responded forcefully enough.

The way in which EFSA places GM approvals ahead of public health issues has revived calls by the GM-Free Cymru group to break the administrative logjam that sidelined European Parliament petitions 0436/2010 and 0813/2008. Writing to the European Parliament, spokesman Dr Brian John described the EFSA response as "damage limitation" when faced with a challenging peer-reviewed paper that had been cleared for publication by a reputable journal.

Despite a carefully orchestrated barrage of calls for Seralini's raw data, there is no mainstream indignation over the way commercial sensitivity arguments have been used to keep GM research data out of public scrutiny. The CRIIGEN website carried a short statement in French from Dr Seralini: "We don't expect anything of EFSA, which has been badly wrong-footed by its conflicts of interest on GMOs, as I wrote in my book."

What is more, Seralini adds, the agency is trying to act as both judge and jury in this case. It has authorised products that have undergone long-term testing by Seralini's team and the results have been published [by Seralini's team] in one of the world's best toxicological journals.

"To authorise these products, EFSA has worked in a very lax manner and in a very short term time frame," Seralini warns. His book, which has appeared in French, puts the scientific establishment in the dock for being corporate mouthpieces rather than being true to scientific principles.

  • Prev
  • Next

Menu

Home

News

News Archive

News Reviews

Videos

Articles

GM Myth Makers

GM Reports

GM Myths

GM Quotes

How Donations Will Help Us

Contacts

Contact Us

About

Facebook

Twitter

RSS

Content 1999 - 2021 GMWatch.
Web Development By SCS Web Design