It’s an unfashionable thing to admit, but sometimes what happens in the European Parliament really matters. This week, unnoticed by almost everyone, MEPs will consider proposals by the European commission and member states to overturn a ban on the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe. But it’s a step that could be undermined if anti-GM lobbyists get their way.

This little-noticed debate could be crucial for the future of European agriculture. For nearly 15 years the European Union maintained a de-facto ban on any GM cultivation despite repeated advice from independent scientists that GM should be allowed to go ahead. This ban operated because certain countries, such as France and Hungary, have made it clear that they will never approve a GM crop under any circumstances, thereby preventing any other member state within the EU’s single market from allowing farmers to plant biotech seeds.

No-one thinks that the French and Hungarians, who seem to have integrated anti-GM superstition into their cultural DNA, are going to change their minds anytime soon. So the proposals put in front of the European Parliament by the commission and member states (via the European council) were intended to allow anti-biotech countries to opt out of any pending GM crop approvals. The likes of France and Hungary would no longer have to advance their customary spurious scientific justifications: a religious-like aversion to new plant breeding technology will do just fine.

This is a bitter pill to swallow if you think that science-based risk assessment should guide policymaking on important issues. But it is probably a necessary compromise in order to allow EU members like the UK, Spain and the Netherlands - who do want to move forwards on biotech research - to do so without being held back forever by the intransigents. Notably, these European council proposals won near-unanimous approval, from both anti and pro-GM countries in Europe, because they would allow each to make their own decisions.

But this compromise, carefully crafted over four years of tortuous European Council negotiations, is now being undermined by anti-GM lobbyists working furiously behind the scenes in Brussels and Strasbourg. The latest proposals from the parliament’s influential environment committee have been so drastically amended that they would make the existing stalemate even worse.

Specifically, the amendments the committee has put to fellow MEPs remove the requirement to first request a national opt-out before a country ban can be introduced. This upsets the careful compromise, where companies applying for permission to market GM seeds would be expected to agree to national opt-outs in order to avoid bans being formally introduced. The fear is that if anti-GM member states are allowed to go straight to the banning stage, this undermines the single market and would put unfair political pressure on those who want to allow GM cultivation. “If France has banned it,” the activists would shout, “it must be dangerous!”

The amendments also further undermine the council’s proposals by suggesting opt-outs can be justified on safety grounds. In practice no seed developer will sign up to a statement that its product is unsafe, so countries would move straight to the national ban stage.

These provisions appear intended by whoever drafted them behind the scenes to upset the proposed compromise and thereby keep the existing stalemate. This does make some kind of twisted sense: for the antis, of course, a de-facto ban is as good as a legally-agreed one, especially if it prevents any EU member state from moving forward. For the anti-GM campaigners, this is about keeping the EU blocked, preferably forever.

Those pursuing this intransigent line will no doubt present themselves as the good guys, trying to stop the bad guys at Monsanto from enslaving European farmers. But that is a red herring. Monsanto has already publicly announced that it has given up on crop biotechnology in Europe. And in any case it should be farmers who decide which seeds they choose to grow, not city-based lobbyists working for NGOs.

With private-sector crop biotech largely out of the picture, the activists are now trying to stamp out public-sector biotech in Europe as well. To the quiet despair of scientists at national academies, plant research institutes and universities across the continent, MEPs now risk sleepwalking into approving legislation which would effectively prohibit scientific research by default. The result would be that important taxpayer-funded biotech work could be frozen out of Europe on the back of a redundant anti-Monsanto trope.

This matters because Europe is still, despite years of anti-biotech vandalism and pervasive misinformation, a leader in publicly-funded research to address some of the real challenges in agriculture. A consortium of European universities and public-sector research institutions has, for example, developed a blight-resistant potato, which could drastically reduce the need for chemical fungicides. Will European farmers ever be able to grow them? Not if MEPs rubber-stamp the latest proposals.

Similarly, work by the UK-based Rothamsted Research on omega-3 oilseeds, aimed at developing a sustainable source of fish oils for salmon farmers, may never get beyond the laboratory. Instead, we will carry on hoovering up all the fish in the ocean to make fishmeal for feeding salmon – increasing the destruction of marine biodiversity, ironically in order to satisfy the entrenched ideologies of Greenpeace and its anti-biotech fellow travellers.

There will be a chilling effect in developing countries too: in Bangladesh, anti-GMO campaigners are currently trying to stop poor farmers having access to aubergine seeds that eliminate the need for pesticides spraying. I have personally experienced how the antis, both in Asia and Africa, constantly cite European resistance to GMOs as proof of the validity of their cause and as justification for banning developing country farmers from accessing improved crops.

The timeline is tight: the deadline for amendments to the European Parliament’s environment committee is Wednesday, with the new proposals set to be approved on 5 November. MEPs will no doubt be under intense pressure from NGO lobbyists to approve the amendments. Before doing so, they might consider consulting less politically powerful actors – in particular the scientific community whose work stands to be outlawed.

Make no mistake: within three weeks from now crop biotech in Europe could be dead and buried. Europe’s cutting edge in an important field of scientific innovation will be lost forever. And our continent’s farmers will be stuck using gallons of pesticides and chemical fertilisers when science offers more environmentally-friendly ways of growing crops - if only European politicians will allow European farmers to use them.

• Mark Lynas is an environmental writer and campaigner, and is currently visiting fellow at the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, Cornell University @mark_lynas

