Germany's two national legislative bodies were at loggerheads over genetically modified (GM) plant legislation yesterday (September 22) after an arbitration panel that is supposed to conciliate between the Parliament and Bundesrat failed to reach a consensus.

On July 9, the representatives of Germany's 16 provinces in the Bundesrat—dominated by the Christian Democrat party—defeated a bill that had been approved by the Parliament (Bundestag), where Social Democrat (SPD) and Green parties hold the majority.

The arbitration panel is supposed to mediate between Bundestag and Bundesrat, but "the talks there are still extremely emotionally charged," Wolf-Dieter Glatzel, who represents the SPD faction in the panel, told The Scientist. Each party accuses the other of irrationality, as they struggle to draft a law that will allow commercial use of plant biotechnology while being acceptable to opponents of the technology.

Originally, the federal government was supposed to implement EU guidelines for releasing GM plants by 2002, but the law proposed by the minister of consumer protection, Renate Künast, a member of the Green party, was fiercely criticized by all major research organizations, who called it a "law of gene technology prevention."

There are two major points at issue, both concerning liability in case crops sown by conventional or organic farmers and contaminated by the neighboring fields of GM farmers.

While the EU guidelines recognize a contamination only when it exceeds a threshold level of 0.9%, the draft of the German law also acknowledges economic damage to an organic farmer if the contamination exceeds a threshold that he or she has arranged individually with his customers.

Secondly, the law currently allows for all neighboring GM farmers to be held liable for the damage collectively, even if they have personally followed all rules of good agricultural practice. The German Farmers Association therefore discourages its members from planting GM crops because of incalculable economic risks.

An alliance of German research organizations, including the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer Society, the German Research Foundation, and the Conference of University Rectors, sent an open letter to the arbitration panel last week. The letter said that the bill would prevent experiments with GM plants, making internationally competitive research impossible.

In addition to criticizing the liability rules, the research bodies were unhappy that cultivation areas for GM plants would have to be disclosed in a public registry, as experimental fields have been destroyed regularly by environmental activists in the past. The bill, the alliance writes, therefore "jeopardizes the future of the major branches of innovation in Germany."

The European Commission has also criticized the German bill in a detailed statement from July 26 for undermining EU regulations. If the bill is enacted without major changes, a legal procedure at the European Court may be foreseeable.

The arbitration panel will meet again for further consultation by the end of October, but members of the political opposition, such as Christel Happach-Kasan from the Liberal party (FDP), don't believe that the governing parties will try to find a compromise. "Fundamental opposition to green biotechnology is popular, but not enforceable in the EU any more," she said. The likely outcome will be that decisions will be left to the courts, she said.