Mr President, Commissioner Byrne, under Directive 70/524, high-technology additives are treated differently, depending on the date of authorisation. The Commission has proposed harmonising the authorisation procedure so that substances licensed before 1988 are put on an equal footing with substances authorised now. As far as we in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development are concerned, so far so good. However, the directive also encompasses the authorisation of antibiotics, drugs, growth-promoters and genetically-modified organisms. That makes it a question of health, not just approximating laws, which is why we in the Committee on Agriculture take the view that the legal base – Article 37 – is not admissible here and that the Commission should submit its proposal to us on the basis of Article 152, that is to say with codecision by Parliament. We asked the opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, which pointed out that, as far as approximating laws is concerned, Article 37 is adequate in this case. However, we in the Committee on Agriculture have not confined ourselves to approximating laws; because this proposal also encompasses genetically-modified organisms, we have tabled a further proposed amendment which affects the content and hence public health. We negotiated with the Commission for two years on the seed directive and came to a compromise regulating the release of genetically-modified organisms in the directive, taking the text on which Directive 70/524 is based as a starting point. Mr Byrne, we fail to understand why the Commission is not approximating the text on genetically-modified organisms as part of its harmonisation work. We have now tabled a proposed amendment on precisely this compromise with the Commission on the text. Moreover, this text has also been adopted in the forest directive on the use of forest reproductive material and we feel that this text urgently needs to be adopted in this directive as well. The Commission pointed out in committee that it plans to present a novel feed directive in the future. However, that should not prevent us from harmonising the text in order to ensure that there is no legal uncertainty between the various directives. We are therefore assuming that you will accept our proposed amendment with regard to genetically-modified organisms. Directive 70/524 still contains the old text because the seed directive was submitted to Parliament in 1986 and we then negotiated with the Commission until 1988, while the report on this directive was dealt with in 1994 and Parliament obviously did not accord genetically-modified organisms the same importance then as it did later when I was rapporteur. We therefore assume, Commissioner Byrne, that you too will accept our proposed amendment of the legal base. If you do not, we must reserve the right to refer this report back to committee and then negotiate this sensitive point with you, exactly as we did with the seed directive. I should point out that the text which we have now worked out is a valid compromise, both for your legal service and ours. In other words, we do not need to re-negotiate the text; we merely need to adopt this text in the directive. I can hardly wait, Commissioner Byrne, to hear what you have to say to our proposals. (Applause)

Political group: Verts-ALE