“I’m ecstatic – I feel as if Austria has become the European Cup winner in soccer,” enthused Austria’s environment minister Nikolaus Berlakovich yesterday, after European Union environment ministers voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing both Austria and Hungary to keep their national bans on cultivation of the genetically-modified maize Mon810. The Wiener Zeitung headlined: ‘Triumph for Austria’.

The European Commission, on the other hand, was humiliatingly relegated. It had proposed that the two countries lift their bans which contravenes an EU directive to which all 27 EU member states are signed up. The directive allows only scientific arguments to exclude GM crops from cultivation, and allows no opt-outs. The Commission had rejected the two countries’ portfolios of scientific concerns as insufficient.

The Wiener Zeitung reported further the nerve-wracking run-up to the vote, which had been expected to be inconclusive. In the last few hours, “Austria was able to pull all of the undecided countries onto its side,” it reports. These included Germany, Italy and (surprisingly, given that it is Europe’s largest grower of GM maize) Spain. In a statement clearly more political than scientific, Germany’s environment minister Siegmar Gabriel (SPD) was reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as saying “I cannot recognise the product from Monsanto as added value for society… the company is forcing dependency on German farmers”. The coalition government in Germany, now gearing up for the September general election, is split on the issue – research minister Annette Schavan (CDU) is in favour of GM crops.

Only four countries voted in favour of the Commission’s proposal – Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. To avoid a political crisis within the EU, the Netherlands has called for a change to the directive to allow regional opt-outs. But the Commission has other options. For example, it could propose brand-new legislation to force the bans to be lifted.

In the next few months, the European environment ministers will vote on related Commission proposals – to lift bans in France and Greece on the cultivation of Mon801, so far the only GM crop approved for cultivation, and to approve for cultivation two additional varieties of GM maize.