-REUTERS-

The long awaited reform of the European Novel Food Regulation (NFR) appears to have been derailed, after nearly 10 years of an extended consultation process, negotiations and advocacy by many stakeholders (of which CFF has been a partner), by the failure of European lawmakers to compromise over the labelling of food stemming from the offspring of cloned animals. This is bad news for all those who hoped that a reformed NFR would lessen the food safety evidence that importers of traditional food must generate before they can introduce such “exotic” produce on the EU market, a long and costly process that has emerged as a non-tariff trade barrier to the trade in biodiversity products, mostly from neglected crops. Recent examples for products challenged by the NFR include the vitamin C-rich Amazonian fruit camu camu (Myrciaria dubia), baobab (Adansonia digitata) from Southern Africa, and the Andean root yacon (Smallanthus sonchifolius), all of which are established components of human diets, albeit outside of Europe. The failure to agree on a new NFR bill means that the stringent rules governing EU market access of novel food will continue to be applied to traditional food products (viewed as “exotic” from the EU perspective), which fall under the remit of the NFR. It is of a certain irony, that as with the original NFR, which was shaped by concerns over the food safety of GMOs, it is again fears by European consumers of anything that smacks of “genetic” or “clonal” that have lead to the abortion of the reform of the regulation and will curtail opportunities for poor countries to generate export income from native biodiversity. For more information on the NFR refer to this site.