Europe's farmers will not see any more clarity on EU rules for separating traditional, organic and biotech crops until at least 2009 as experts sift through scientific data on specific plant varieties.

The European Commission issued guidelines in July 2003 on how farmers should separate the three types. The idea was for national governments to make their own laws to facilitate growing of genetically modified (GMO) crops if farmers wanted to do so.

Commission officials say only seven EU countries have co-existence laws in place: Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and several regions in Austria. A further eight countries have notified their plans. Many of these countries have still to develop crop-specific 'good farming' practices, such as field-isolation distances and crop-cleaning procedures. Very few have specific rules on economic liability in cases of cross-contamination, they say.

For some years, the Commission has come under pressure from several countries to draft an EU-wide coexistence law. Early last year, it disappointed many by saying this was unnecessary. But it did pledge to compile far more specific growing guidelines for farmers.

It does not look as if that will happen soon, with work not due to start in earnest until the second half of 2007 and then, maybe, taking up to two years. "Now we need some practical and technical elements for the only crop that is allowed for cultivation in the Community," said Daniele Bianchi, responsible for GMO policy in the cabinet of EU Agriculture Commission Mariann Fischer Boel at a conference last week. "It will take more than two years to come to some kind of guidelines or conclusions on this issue."

While there is no plan to revise the general non-binding 2003 guidelines, the latest project envisages more technical detail on crop segregation, according to a senior Commission official.

If EU countries did not intend to develop national crop laws, the Commission guidelines could be a basis for ‘voluntary standards’ for good farming practice, a tacit admission that no country would be forced to adopt a coexistence law, he said.