Parma: The European Food Safety Authority finished its work on two genetically modified soybeans this summer and said so plainly. In early July its panel cleared the renewal of soybean FG72 for food and feed use, and on 29 July it published a favourable opinion on the stacked variety DAS-44406-6 by FG72. Both files now leave the scientists and enter the part of the process that scientists cannot fix.

EFSA does not authorise anything. It assesses risk and hands the assessment to the Commission, which drafts an implementing decision and puts it to member state experts. Those experts have, for well over a decade, produced no qualified majority either way on GMO authorisations. The file then climbs to an appeal committee, produces no opinion there either, and returns to the Commission, which authorises it alone because the comitology rules leave no alternative.

Everyone involved understands the choreography. National officials abstain or vote against because domestic politics punishes a yes and EU law punishes an unjustified no. The Commission absorbs the decision and the criticism. Farm ministers then complain about unelected officials approving GM imports, having personally declined to vote. The pattern repeats several times a year with a consistency that would be funny if the volumes were smaller.

The volumes are not small. European livestock farming imports enormous quantities of soybean meal, most of it genetically modified, because the bloc grows nowhere near enough protein crops to feed its own herds. An authorisation refusal would not remove GM soy from European supply chains. It would remove the legal basis for imports that arrive regardless, and pig and poultry producers know exactly what that would do to feed costs.

Nothing in the current authorisation framework forces a member state to explain an abstention, and that omission does most of the damage. A voting record that carries no obligation to give reasons lets ministers hold two positions at once, one for Parma and one for their national press. Several MEPs have proposed requiring written justifications in the appeal committee, which would at least put the contradiction on paper.

A separate reform sits alongside this one. The bloc agreed rules for plants produced by new genomic techniques, which treats certain gene-edited varieties more like conventional breeding, and national competent authorities are now building the verification systems that regime assumes. Those crops follow a different track from imported transgenic soy, and conflating the two has muddled the debate in several capitals.

EFSA meanwhile keeps tightening its own procedures, including updated guidance on the data applicants must submit, published in its journal and now applying to new dossiers. Better science does not resolve a governance problem. The agency delivers cleaner opinions into a decision system that has stopped deciding, and the authority cannot legislate its way out of that.