EU to debate Hungary GMO ban, flowers and potatoes

EU environment ministers will rekindle Europe's simmering row on genetically modified (GMO) foods next month when they tackle three different strands of the debate, including whether to authorize a "live" biotech crop.

All three GMO items, to be debated when the ministers meet on February 20, have already undergone a lower-level process when EU experts failed to reach a required majority consensus. Under EU law, those items now pass to ministers for approval.

Two of them look set to be highly controversial: a draft order for Hungary to lift its ban on a GMO maize and a proposal to let farmers grow a GMO potato, the EU's first attempt in eight years to approve a biotech crop designed for cultivation.

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