BRUSSELS, March 20 (Reuter) - The European Union's new food safety chief, Emma Bonino, called on Thursday for tougher controls to protect consumers from possible health threats posed by the production and marketing of gene-altered soya and other foodstuffs. Speaking on the first anniversary of the British disclosures that led to an international crisis over mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Bonino was attempting to show a critical European Parliament that she was pressing ahead with plans to improve food safety standards. British Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell's admission in parliament in London a year ago that there was a possible food chain link between BSE and a rare human form of BSE -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Disease (CJD) -- sent shock waves around Europe and provoked the EU to ban all British beef product exports. "I intend proposing the creation of a scientific committee to examine the risks from genetically modified organisms (GMOs)," Bonino told the parliament's env

ironment committee. Bonino explained that scientific evidence available last year when the European Commission approved imports of gene-modified soybeans and maize did not justify a ban. "But science is developing and we should keep a close check on what is happening," she added. The combative Italian commissioner criticised member states, such as France, for pursuing an incoherent policy by allowing the marketing but not the planting of gene-modified maize. "You can eat it but you can't sow it," she said. Bonino said she entirely agreed with the parliament that such products should be clearly labelled but the difficulty was how this should be done. Seeking to soothe Euro MPs, furious at beingsidelined by EU member states, Bonino said that the European Commission would continue to press for them to share in decision-making. "The results were very disappointing," she said, referring to a unanimous decision by farm ministers on Wednesday to press ahead without parliament and make it compulsory to label the ori

gin of beef from January 2000. The environment committee later urged the Commission to take legal action against the farm ministers. "The ministers have learned nothing from the mad cow crisis. They have gone back to their bad old ways of taking decisions in secret," the committee's British Socialist chairman Ken Collins said in a statement. Bonino criticised EU capitals for rejecting the idea of an independent food safety agency, opting instead for an enlarged veterinary inspection office financed by the EU budget. Next week Bonino flies to the United States for discussions with the Food and Drug Administration in Washington to examine how it controls food safety. But she noted that it could not serve as a model because it did not cover meat, poultry and fish, and was far too big a bureaucracy, employing 9,000 people. A discussion paper on food safety rules and controls is due in April and will be followed by a food conference in September. Bonino, who only officially takes up her food safety role on April

1, said her ideas on scientific advice and controls would be discussed at the end of that month. Since 1986, about 178,000 BSE cases have been confirmed in the European Union and Switzerland, according to a European Commission information sheet. Up to the end of 1996, most of the cases -- around 172,000 -- were in Britain, followed by Switzerland with 230 and Ireland with 185, EU sources said. EU measures to combat the disease and compensate farmers are expected to cost more than five billion ecus ($5.6 billion) over the three years to the end of 1998. Britain has slaughtered 1.3 million older cattle since April 1996 and this week started to cull 100,000 more animals believed to be most at risk of developing BSE.