The green organizations have charged firms pioneering GMO’s of using poor east European states as a back door to a averse EU do not want to sell and grow this type of soy bean in EU between 1998 and 2004.
“The ministry decided to ban the cultivation of genetically modified soy from next year to comply with the European regulatory norms,” Constantin Sin, the agriculture ministry’s GMO expert told Reuters.
Monsanto officials in Bucharest were not immediately available to comment.
Biotech companies say their technology helps fight starvation and poverty but the green organizations and many Europeans oppose GMO’s, which they fear might be risky for humans.
Romania, where there is almost no reluctance to embrace biotech foods among its 22 million population, put 61,000 ha under soy in 2004. The land had risen to 88,000 ha last year, or 0.6 percent of the country’s whole farmland.
Gene-spliced soy, which is used by Romanian farmers as animal feed, is the only GMO crop cultivated in Romania and accounts for two thirds of it’s larger soy outputwhich they use. (The question: where take they the rest of the GMO’s soy bean?)
“The bill aims to discourage farmer s from planting (genetically modified) soy. There will be fines worth thousands of euros for those who don’t comply with it,” Sin said.
He said a switch to traditional soy crops and the good information about this growing method would help farmers - who started growing GMO’s tempted by the higher profit margins - to benefit from badly needed EU aid once the country joins the wealthy bloc.
Romania has banned the GMO’s product from the country but some weeks ago the investigators found two big harvest close to the Black Sea.
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