Most products on supermarket shelves carry labels indicating the absence of genetically modified ingredients. But government agencies say they have no way to check. segodnya.ua Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry said the country’s use of genetically modified (GM) organisms is next to none, but they cannot really check because the budget has no money for expensive tests.

Some agrarian experts have raised concerns that up to 70 percent of soya and corn growing in Ukraine can be genetically modified. “We categorically disagree with this information,” Oleksandr Demydov, director of the crop production markets department at the ministry, wrote in a letter to the Kyiv Post on May 5.

The letter came in response to an inquiry by the Kyiv Post into the use of genetically modified organisms and their marking in stores that is required by law as of March.

“The issue of possible illegal growth of genetically modified plants is under our constant supervision,” said Demydov. “However, it requires an efficient monitoring program that should be financed out of the state budget.”

The Ministry is conducting regular inspections related to GMOs, but has limited resources for testing.

“We won’t be able to stop the spread of genetically modified organisms, this is fact. However, we have the capacity to inform the consumer,” said Mykola Prysiazhniuk, now Agriculture Minister, to the Ukrainian Business Resource portal in October 2009.

The law that came into effect on March 9 binds food producers to indicate on the label the presence or absence of GM ingredients in the food content. Producers and especially retailers are fined if no such indication is present of the packaging.

The requirements raises many eyebrows because there are no legally registered GMOs grown in Ukraine.

“We’ve already spent Hr 150,000 on ‘Without GMO’ stickers, which obviously came out of the pockets of the consumers,” Henadiy Yurchenko, director of corporate relations at Nestle food company in Ukraine told Kyiv Post in a recent interview.

Nevertheless, genetically modified food still makes it to the supermarkets and the tables of the unaware Ukrainians.

The spot check conducted in December 2009 by Poltava Standartmetrologia, the government agency that certifies and controls the food standards, found that 70 percent of prepared frozen meat products contained genetically modified soya, while the label indicated they were “Without GMO.”

Another government consumer protection agency in Kyiv, Derzhspozhyvstandart, said it found genetically modified ingredients in 5 percent of the tested samples in 2009-2010.

But these tests remain sporadic as the government has enough money only for limited inspections.