Realisation that EU has shortage of animal feed starts to bite

EU farm chief says happy but wary on French stance
* Reuters Monday February 25 2008
By Tamora Vidaillet

In this item , from PARIS, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Europe's farm chief said on Monday she welcomed France's willingness to discuss modifications to the bloc's Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) but any hint of protectionism would be unacceptable.
Speaking on the sidelines of Europe's biggest annual farm show under way in Paris, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said she believed that the European Commission shared some ideas on agricultural reform with France...

...Fischer Boel said that the fact the French government had been using the EU expression of "community preference" could prove risky, depending on what exactly it meant.
"To translate 'la preference communautaire' as the protection of European products, I'm not in favour of as Europe is today the biggest importer and the biggest exporter of agricultural products worldwide," she told a news conference.
"If we imagine that we now close our own markets for our own customers, then we would lose," she said...

...Turning to the subject of genetically modified (GMO) products used in animal feed, Fischer Boel called for deeper debate and an assessment of the facts.
Describing French views towards GMOs as "special", she stressed that 90 percent of all soybeans imported into Europe today were genetically modified and that the figure for maize imports stood at 50 percent.
While she had "no intention whatsoever to water down" the current approval system, which proved slower than mechanisms employed in the United States, deeper debate was needed.
Europe now had important choices to make on the imports of GMO products used in animal feed given that the current system of slow and complicated approvals could translate into higher prices for animal producers.

European consumers could also turn to cheaper food imports rather than EU produced farm goods, she said.

"I think we cheat the consumers because when we import beef from South America, (it) will be fed by GMs which are not even approved in Europe so we export our own production and that is crazy from my point of view," she said.

"Therefore I think we should have a discussion in the Council to see what can be done to avoid a situation where we have a shortage of imports of feed stuff -- soybeans -- which means at the end of the day that production will take place somewhere else," she said.

The item goes on to say that EU feedmakers have long complained of problems sourcing raw material, warning that the consequences of Europe's extreme caution and "zero tolerance" of unauthorised GMOs, even in tiny amounts, could be catastrophic for the food and feed sectors.

It notes that world grain prices soaring and the EU's livestock and animal feed sectors are facing supply shortages, with pressure mounting for the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, to do something about the speed at which the EU approves new GMOs...