EU to clear new GMO beet

By Jeremy Smith

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU ministers and national experts are due to approve a genetically modified (GMO) sugar beet variety this month despite a long running dispute over the use of biotechnology.

Officials say around 10 GMO products, mostly maize types but also cotton, soybeans and a high-starch potato, are scheduled for discussion at various levels of the EU in the next few months.

Although the bloc's member governments clash consistently over GMOs, never reaching the required majority under its weighted voting system to authorize new biotech products, that deadlock doesn't stop authorizations being granted.

Since 2004, the European Commission has approved around a dozen GMO products -- a move that brings it into line with EU law when, after a certain time, countries still fail either to endorse or reject a draft GMO authorization.

The Commission, the EU's executive arm, has authorized a string of GMOs in this way, outraging green groups.

The first of this year's applications for GMO crops that will be approved, now a certainty, is a sugar beet called H7-1, developed jointly by U.S. biotech giant Monsanto and German plant breeding company KWS SAAT AG to resist glyphosate-containing herbicides.

Due to a complex legal procedure over deadlines for EU ministers to consider the matter, it will be EU justice ministers who will actually grant the authorization at their meeting scheduled for September 17 and 18. There will be no vote.

"I don't really see anything that has changed. The Austrians, and maybe other countries, will make a symbolic statement but it won't alter things," one EU diplomat said.