Last year in response to such warnings, the European Commission, the EU executive, proposed capping the bloc’s use of crop-based biofuels at five per cent of total transport fuel demand.

That was a U-turn from three years before, when the European Union had set a legally binding target to source 10 per cent of its transport fuel from renewable sources by 2020, mostly crop-based biofuels.

On Friday, EU ambassadors meeting in Brussels drew up a draft compromise that would raise the proposed cap to seven per cent.

With the bloc’s use of crop-based biofuels already at around five per cent and with enough production capacity in place to meet the 10 per cent target, the change would offer a lifeline to some biofuel producers who had invested heavily to meet the earlier goal.

The compromise are to be discussed by the bloc’s energy ministers in Brussels on Dec. 12. EU diplomats said that while the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and Luxembourg were likely to oppose the change, that would not be enough to block agreement if other countries give their support.

That would set up a clash with lawmakers in the European Parliament, who have called for a lower cap of six per cent and a new mandatory target for the use of advanced, non-crop fuels made from algae or agricultural wastes. Most governments want the new target to be voluntary.

“Caving”

Environmental and anti-poverty campaigners reacted angrily to the draft compromise and urged governments to reject it.

“If EU energy ministers give their green light, they will be caving into pressure from self-interested biofuel lobbyists and encouraging further hunger, land-grabs and environmental damage,” said Marc Olivier Herman, biofuels expert for campaign group Oxfam.

While some companies accept that some forms of biofuel need to be phased out, it says policy changes have to be handled carefully.

“The problem is people have invested on the back of 10 per cent,” Iain Conn, group managing director at BP, said in Brussels this week.

“The risk is that people lose confidence. Why would someone invest on the back of that if it might become five? Changing the rules of the game is very difficult.”

Last month, the parliament opted against opening negotiations with EU governments to finalize the rules, forcing a second reading of the legislation.

That means a final agreement will happen only after European parliamentary elections in May, which means the law is unlikely to be in place before 2015 at the earliest.

— Charlie Dunmore is a Reuters correspondent covering EU ag, food and transport policy from Brussels.

Related story:
EU lawmakers deal blow to crop-based biofuels, July 11, 2013

The post Governments seek to raise EU cap on food-based biofuels appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

Japan cancelled a tender offer to buy U.S. western white wheat, while other top Asian wheat importers South Korea, China and the Philippines said they were closely monitoring the situation.

“We will refrain from buying western white and feed wheat effective today,” Toru Hisadome, a Japanese farm ministry official in charge of wheat trading, told Reuters.

The world’s biggest wheat importer, Egypt, said it had no fears yet over supplies.

The European Union is preparing to test incoming shipments, and will block any containing GM wheat. Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures were down around 1 per cent.

GM wheat was discovered this spring on a farm in Oregon, in a field that grew winter wheat in 2012. USDA officials said that when a farmer sprayed the so-called “volunteer” plants with a glyphosate herbicide, some of them unexpectedly survived.

Scientists found the wheat was a strain field-tested from 1998 to 2005 and deemed safe before St. Louis-based biotech giant Monsanto withdrew it from the regulatory approval process on worldwide opposition to genetically engineered wheat.

GM crops tolerate certain pesticides, allowing farmers to improve weed control and increase yields.

No GM wheat varieties are approved for general planting in the U.S. or elsewhere, the USDA said. The EU has asked Monsanto for a detection method to allow its controls to be carried out.

With high consumer wariness towards genetically-modified food, few countries allow imports of such cereals for direct human consumption.

“The developers of GE wheat have repeatedly said that GE wheat will not contaminate conventional or organic wheat because it is predominantly self-pollinating. Despite these empty promises, GE contamination has happened,” Greenpeace International scientist Janet Cotter said.

“The only way to protect our food and environment is to stop the releases of GE crops to the environment — including a ban on field trials.”

However, the bulk of U.S. corn and soybean crops are genetically modified.

Wayne Bacon, president of French-based grain trader Hammersmith Marketing, said there would be a natural knee-jerk consumer response.

“We all buy things with GM products in it every day, we just don’t know about it, but if suddenly we know that the loaf of bread we are buying is made from GMO wheat then it becomes a very negative thing with the consumer.”

Rapeseed, rice

The latest finding revives memories of farmers unwittingly planting genetically modified rapeseed in Europe in 2000, while in 2006 a large part of the U.S. long-grain rice crop was contaminated by an experimental strain from Bayer CropScience , prompting import bans in Europe and Japan.

The company agreed in court in 2011 to pay US$750 million to growers as compensation.

Asia imports more than 40 million tonnes of wheat annually, almost a third of the global trade of 140-150 million tonnes. The bulk of the region’s supplies come from the United States, the world’s biggest exporter, and Australia, the No. 2 supplier.

USDA said there was no sign that genetically engineered wheat had entered the commercial market, but grain traders warned the discovery could hurt export prospects for U.S. wheat.

“Asian consumers are jittery about genetically modified food,” said Abah Ofon, an analyst at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore. “This is adding to concerns that already exist on quality and availability of food wheat globally.”

European traders said Black Sea and EU wheat was well positioned to benefit in any displaced demand for U.S. grain. But some were more pragmatic on the overall impact.

“Japan is in a position to be selective and to react sharply. It has other suppliers and the financial means to be choosy and pay more if needed. This is not necessarily the case for Egypt which is in a difficult financial situation,” a European trader said.

Buyers cautious

China has emerged as a key buyer of U.S. wheat this year, taking around 1.5 million tonnes in the past two months. Chinese purchases in the year to June 2014 are estimated to rise 21 per cent to 3.5 million tonnes, according to USDA, with most shipments coming from the U.S., Australia and Canada.

The Philippines, which buys about four million tonnes of wheat a year and relies mainly on U.S. supplies, is waiting for more details before acting, an industry official in Manila said.

“I won’t be surprised if other countries start cancelling or reducing their purchases of U.S. wheat, particularly Asian countries, putting pressure on wheat demand,” said Joyce Liu, an investment analyst at Phillip Futures in Singapore.

Genetically modified crops cannot be grown legally in the U.S. unless the government approves them after a review to ensure they pose no threat to the environment or to people.

Monsanto, in a statement posted on its website, said: “While USDA’s results are unexpected, there is considerable reason to believe that the presence of the Roundup Ready trait in wheat, if determined to be valid, is very limited.”

— Risa Maeda and Charlie Dunmore write for Reuters from Tokyo and Brussels respectively. Additional reporting by Naveen Thukral in Singapore, Niu Shuping in Beijing, Erik dela Cruz in Manila, Jane Chung in Seoul, Yayat Supriatna in Jakarta, Valerie Parent, Michael Hogan and Sarah Mcfarlane.

The post U.S. GM wheat find threatens exports, stokes consumer fear appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

The executive European Commission said Monday it would press ahead with the ban on a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, produced mainly by Germany’s Bayer and Switzerland’s Syngenta, despite the EU’s 27 member states failing to reach an agreement on the matter.

The Commission proposed the ban in January after EU scientists said the chemicals posed an acute risk to honeybees, which pollinate many of the crops grown commercially in Europe.

However, pesticide manufacturers and some scientists say no link has been proven between the use of neonicotinoids and a sharp decline in bee numbers in Europe in recent years, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Basel-based Syngenta criticised the Commission’s decision, blaming declining bee numbers on habitat loss and diseases carried by parasites such as the Varroa mite.

“The proposal is based on poor science and ignores a wealth of evidence from the field that these pesticides do not damage the health of bees,” the company said in a statement.

The ban will hit sales of Syngenta’s popular Cruiser seed treatments, widely used to protect crops such as rapeseed and maize from aphids and other pests.

But it could boost sales of chemical alternatives to neonicotinoids produced by rival firms such as Dow Chemical, leading some scientists to point out that little is known about the effects of such older compounds on bee health.

Syngenta and Bayer say research shows a neonicotinoid ban could cost Europe billions of euros in lost crop yields.

A 2011 United Nations report, meanwhile, estimated that bees and other pollinators such as butterflies, beetles and birds do work worldwide worth US$203 billion a year to the human economy.

In total, 15 EU countries voted in favour of the ban — two more than the last time governments voted on the issue in March — but they failed to reach the weighted majority needed to adopt the ban outright, meaning the decision passed to the Commission.

The ban will apply to the use of neonicotinoids on all crops except winter cereals and plants not attractive to bees, such as sugar beet. It will apply from Dec. 1, 2013 – five months later than originally proposed by the Commission.

— Charlie Dunmore covers EU agricultural issues for Reuters from Brussels, Belgium.

Related stories:
“Dust-off” in pesticides has farmers’ attention, April 19, 2013
Corn growers, beekeepers await insecticide review, March 22, 2013
EU Commission wants curbs on pesticides to protect bees, Jan. 31, 2013

The post EU to ban pesticides blamed for bee losses appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

Announcing the results on Tuesday, the European Commission said that for the EU as a whole, just less than five per cent of all beef products tested had come back positive for horse DNA.

But the figures showed that of 353 tests carried out in France, 47 tested positive for horse DNA, giving a rate of more than 13 per cent.

“In terms of image it’s not good. It risks delaying our attempt to regain consumer confidence to get out of the crisis, because it is not over yet,” Jean-Rene Buisson, chairman of the French food industry group ANIA, told Reuters.

Buisson said it would be important to know how much horsemeat was detected in each positive sample, as tiny traces could be the result of accidental contamination at processing plants rather than deliberate substitution. The Commission did not provide that information.

Europe’s horsemeat scandal has damaged confidence in parts of the continent’s food industry, hitting sales of processed ready-meals and boosting demand for organic produce.

The programme of EU-funded DNA tests was approved by member governments in February in a bid to gauge the extent of the problem and restore consumer confidence in the bloc’s food safety controls.

The results revealed a mixed picture across the EU. Greece had the second-highest level of positive results with 288 tests yielding 36 positive results, a rate of 12.5 per cent. About one in every 10 tests also returned positive in Latvia, Denmark and Estonia.

By contrast, Germany found horse DNA in just 3.3 per cent of samples, and in the Netherlands the rate was less than one per cent.

Both Ireland — where the discovery in January of horse DNA in a burger labelled as pure beef first sparked the scandal — and Britain — where retailers including Tesco have been forced to withdraw products found to contain horse — returned no positive results for horsemeat.

Health risk?

Britain, however, had 14 positive tests for the potentially harmful veterinary drug phenylbutazone — known as bute — as part of a second set of EU-wide tests on horsemeat destined for human consumption.

The only other countries to find bute in horsemeat were Ireland and the Czech Republic, each recording a single positive result.

“The bute is now really concentrated in the UK, but mainly because the UK has tested every horse slaughtered since February, so they have done a huge number of tests — more than 800,” said a senior EU source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

For the EU as a whole, about 0.6 per cent of slaughtered horses tested positive for bute, the results showed.

EU food safety experts said on Monday that the level of bute residues found in horsemeat was unlikely to pose a health risk.

“The opinion… is encouraging. It shows that it isn’t worrying as such. You’d have to eat hundreds of horsemeat steaks for months before you encountered any problems with phenylbutazone,” EU health spokesman Frederic Vincent told a news briefing on Tuesday.

Criminal investigations are under way in several EU countries to try to identify those responsible for passing off illegally labelled horsemeat as beef.

Last week, authorities in the Netherlands said about 50 million kilos of beef distributed by two Dutch wholesalers over a period of two years may have contained horsemeat, fuelling suspicions that the country could be one of the possible origins of the scandal.

“It’s probably true that the Netherlands is the source of some of the fraud,” the senior EU source said.

— Charlie Dunmore is a Reuters correspondent in Brussels covering EU food, agriculture and fisheries issues.

The post France tops EU DNA tests for horsemeat in beef appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

"The tests will be on DNA in meat products in all member states," European Union health commissioner Tonio Borg told reporters after a ministerial meeting in Brussels to discuss the affair.

The initial one-month testing plan would include premises handling horsemeat to check whether potentially harmful equine medicine residues have entered the food chain, Borg said, with the first results expected by mid-Arpil.

The scandal erupted when tests carried out in Ireland revealed that meat in products labelled as beef was in fact up to 100 per cent horsemeat. Operators in at least eight EU countries have since been dragged into the affair, raising fears of a pan-European labelling fraud.

Officials have said no risk to public health from the adulterated foods has been identified at this stage but testing for horse medicine in meat is being undertaken to be sure.

The suspected fraud has caused particular outrage in Britain, where many view the idea of eating horsemeat with distaste, and exposed flaws in food controls.

"This is impacting on the integrity of the food chain, which is a really significant issue for a lot of countries. Now that we know this is a European problem, we need a European solution," Irish farm minister Simon Coveney told reporters before the meeting.

At the urging of ministers, Borg said the Commission would accelerate work on potential changes to EU labelling rules that would force companies to state the country of origin on processed meat products.

Currently the requirement only applies to fresh beef, and is expected to be extended to fresh lamb, pork and poultry from December 2014.

But EU officials have warned privately that the complexity of supply chains would make the requirement almost impossible to implement in practice.

EU and national authorities are still trying to uncover the source of the suspected horsemeat fraud.

"All those countries through which this meat product has passed of course are under suspicion," Borg told a news briefing earlier on Wednesday. "By the countries, I mean the companies in those countries which dealt with this meat product."

He added that it would be unfair at this stage to point the finger at any organisation in particular.

Not just horse?

On Jan. 15, routine tests by Ireland’s Food Safety Authority found horsemeat in frozen beef burgers produced by firms in Ireland and Britain and sold in supermarket chains including Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer.

Concerns grew last week when the British unit of frozen foods group Findus began recalling packets of beef lasagna on advice from its French supplier Comigel, after tests showed up to 100 per cent of the meat in them was horse.

The affair has since implicated operators and middlemen in a range of EU countries, from abattoirs in Romania and factories in Luxembourg to traders in Cyprus and food companies in France.

Germany said it was investigating a consignment of beef lasagna sent from Luxembourg to an unnamed retailer in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia on suspicion it might contain horsemeat.

The first evidence that the labelling scandal could go beyond horsemeat also emerged when the upmarket British grocer Waitrose said its testing found that some of its frozen British beef meatballs might contain pork.

The firm, part of the John Lewis Partnership, has withdrawn the product from sale.

Horsemeat is traditionally prized by many consumers in EU countries such as France, Italy and Belgium.

— Charlie Dunmore and Adrian Croft are Reuters correspondents based in Brussels and London respectively.

The post Horsemeat scandal to spur tougher EU food tests appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

The European Union’s cereals management committee voted Thursday to extend the suspension of the bloc’s import duties on feed wheat and barley until June 30, 2012, the EU’s executive said in a statement.

The EU in June suspended its import duties of 12 euros per tonne for low- and medium-quality wheat and 16 euros a tonne for feed barley until Dec. 31, in response to a spring drought that hit supplies of animal fodder in Europe.

The decision extended the measure until the end of the marketing year.

The move was made to assist the EU livestock sector, which is struggling to secure affordable feed supplies with grain prices above 180 euros per tonne, a Commission spokesman said in the statement.

Under international rules, the EU fixes maximum duties on cereals imports known as bound tariffs. For imports of low- and medium-quality wheat above the tariff-rate quotas (TRQs), these are fixed at 95 euros per tonne and 93 euros for barley.

A portion of the TRQs for wheat are reserved for imports from the U.S. and Canada, while much of the rest usually comes from Russia and Ukraine.

Traders in import-dependent Spain, who use TRQ permits to buy Ukrainian feed wheat, said they had been expecting the EU to extend the duty waiver. They said demand at the auction due in January would depend on the relative price of maize, the ingredient of choice for Spanish animal feed makers.

"If Ukrainian wheat is more expensive than maize, then there won’t be much appetite for wheat and the auction may be null and void," one Spanish dealer said.

"If, on the other hand, Ukrainian maize fob prices are more expensive, and as Ukrainian maize is the benchmark for maize, then there will be appetite for wheat and plenty of bids."

The committee also agreed to merge the first two quarterly tranches of the 2012 TRQ for low- and medium-quality wheat from all countries excluding the U.S and Canada, which means that traders will be free to bid for total imports of 1,189,194 tonnes from Jan. 1.

— Additional reporting for Reuters by Martin Roberts in Madrid; writing by Sybille de La Hamaide

The post EU extends zero duty on wheat, barley imports appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

The European Union’s cereals management committee may vote Thursday to extend a suspension of the bloc’s import duties on feed wheat and barley until June 30 2012, a draft agenda of the meeting seen by Reuters showed.

In June, the EU suspended its import duties of 12 euros per tonne for low- and medium-quality wheat and 16 euros a tonne for feed barley until Dec. 31, in response to a spring drought that hit supplies of animal fodder.

Thursday’s possible vote could extend the measure until the end of the current marketing year, the agenda showed, to help meet strong demand for animal feed in southern European countries such as Spain, where stocks remain tight.

"It’s clearly the Commission’s intention (to extend the suspension). Cereals are available in quantity from the current EU campaign, but the problem is that they are expensive," a source close to the EU management committee told Reuters.

A spokeswoman for EU farm union Copa-Cogeca said the organisation opposed the extension of zero duties, as wheat prices within Europe were starting to fall.

Under international rules, the EU fixes maximum duties on cereals imports known as bound tariffs. For low- and medium-quality wheat, these are currently fixed at 95 euros per tonne.

For some cereals, the bloc has established TRQs, annual volume quotas for grain imports at duties much lower than the standard bound tariffs.

Exclusive rights

In 2003, the EU introduced TRQs at reduced tariffs for imports of low- and medium-quality wheat, and barley, with exclusive rights for Canada and the U.S.

Of the bloc’s 2,989,240-tonne quota for feed wheat in 2011, 572,000 tonnes are earmarked for imports from the U.S., and 38,853 tonnes for imports from Canada.

The bulk of the import quotas for 2011 have already been filled, but the full volume for 2012 will become available again from Jan. 1, and could be imported at zero duty if the EU committee extends the current measures.

In October, the EU agreed to open a new import quota from 2012 for feed wheat from non-EU countries of 122,790 tonnes, taking the total TRQ for next year to 3,112,030 tonnes.

The post EU may extend zero import duty on feed wheat, barley appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

A European Union committee voted Tuesday to allow traces of unapproved genetically modified (GM) material in animal feed imports, the European Commission said, in a bid to secure grain supplies to the import-dependent bloc. 

EU governments and lawmakers now have three months to either approve or reject the committee’s decision, before the rules can be adopted by the EU executive as law.

“In all likelihood the measure will be adopted by member states and EU parliamentarians, even if we expect a lively debate in the European Parliament,” one EU diplomat involved in the negotiations said. 

The Commission, industry and exporting countries argue the 0.1 per cent threshold is needed to avoid a repeat of supply disruptions in 2009, when U.S. soy shipments to Europe were blocked after tiny quantities of unapproved GM material were found in some cargoes.

The limit “addresses the current uncertainty EU operators face when placing on the market feed based on imports of raw materials from third countries,” the Commission said in a statement.

The EU imported more than 51 million tonnes of animal feed last year, worth almost 15 billion euros (US$20.5 billion), according to Commission trade statistics. About half was GM soy from Brazil and Argentina developed by U.S. biotech company Monsanto.

Green groups accused the EU executive of caving in to GM-industry lobbying by reversing its “zero-tolerance” policy on unauthorized crops. Some environmentalists argue that the effect of consuming GM crops is unknown and say these have not completed the EU’s safety assessment process.

They said the move was an unnecessary solution to a problem that does not exist.

“Weakening safety rules to appease the animal feed industry compromises human and environmental safety,” said Friends of the Earth food campaigner Mute Schimpf.

But the head of EU feedmakers’ association Fefac, Patrick Vanden Avenne, said the decision would “safeguard vital supplies of new crop protein feeds from South America to our EU livestock industry.”

Rules strengthened

Earlier this month the same EU committee failed to reach the necessary majority to approve the rules, because of opposition from some countries, including France.

But on Tuesday France voted in favour, after the conditions that unapproved GM crops must meet in order for the threshold to apply were strengthened, sources close to the committee said.

“The criteria are stricter now than originally envisaged,” said another EU diplomat.

The GM crops in question must have been approved in a non-EU producing country and an EU authorization request must have been lodged with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for at least three months, the diplomat said.

“On top of that… EFSA must have given an assessment that the presence of GM products of 0.1 per cent are not detrimental to health and environment,” the diplomat added.

The 0.1 per cent threshold will only apply to imports of animal feed and not human food, despite warnings from traders and exporting states that it is impractical and costly to separate global grain supplies into those destined for humans and those for animals.

A majority of EU governments are reported to be in favour of a similar threshold for food imports, but a Commission source said on Tuesday there were currently no plans to draft a similar proposal for food for human consumption, but that it would “monitor the situation closely.”

Canada’s federal government, in a release Wednesday, characterized the EU decision as “a good first step” but said Ottawa “will continue to push for a solution that respects sound science and includes access for Canadian crops for uses in food.”

Such market access for feed and industrial use “is not enough for our crop producers,” federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said in the release.

–– Additional reporting for Reuters by Ilona Wissenbach and Julien Toyer. Includes files from AGCanada.com staff.

The post EU experts approve trace GM in feed imports appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.