Tobias Teufer, “GMO-Regulation (EC) No. 1829/2003 and Honey: How to Proceed,” European Food & Feed Law Review, 2011

This article considers how those marketing honey in the European Union (EU) may proceed after the European Court of Justice in September 2011 determined that honey with trace amounts of pollen from genetically modified (GM) corn must undergo a full safety authorization before it can be sold to consumers. Highly critical of the court’s opinion, the author suggests that because it is based on a faulty factual premise involving how honey is produced and harvested, other courts would not necessarily be bound by its interpretation of Regulation (EC) No. 1829/2003, because a proper factual background would present a different case. He calls for amendments to the relevant regulations that would exempt honey from their requirements or establish an upper limit for pollen from GM crops in honey.

The author also suggests that honey will be subject to authorization and labeling requirements only if GM-pollen is present and detected. But he further explains that under existing laws honey with pollen from authorized GM crops is marketable in the EU, while pollen originating from GM crops without authorization “must not be further marketed in the EU.” The article concludes by claiming that “the Court’s reasoning has resulted in chaos. In practice, beekeepers and businesses trading honey all over the world must commission thousands of expensive laboratory analyses in order to determine whether they can lawfully market their honey in the EU. And because of the inhomogeneous character of honey they do not even know whether they can rely on the results of these analyses.”