PARIS - France's Council of State unexpectedly upheld the Ministry of Agriculture order of Feb. 5, 1998, adding three varieties of transgenic corn produced by the Swiss company Syngenta (formerly Novartis Seeds) to the official catalogue of crops that can be grown in France.

It had been asked to declare the ministerial order invalid by an environmental lobby group comprised of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Ecoropa France and the French Peasants' Confederation.

The Council of State is the final arbiter on governmental and administrative decisions in France, and in an interim ruling handed down in September 1998 it temporarily suspended the February 1998 order for precautionary reasons. Now, it not only has resisted the pressures of the ecologists by approving the decision to authorize the planting of genetically modified (GM) corn, but has also extended the period of authorization to the normal 10 years applicable to conventional crops instead of the limited period of three years granted to GM crops.

Before coming to its decision, the council sought the advice of the European Court of Justice on a key issue, namely whether the French authorities had the right to oppose a decision taken by the European Commission to authorize the planting of these transgenic crops. The situation was paradoxical insofar as it was the French government that had asked the Commission in Brussels to approve these corn varieties in the first place. The justices replied that a European Union member government could decline to apply a Commission ruling only if it produced new scientific information relating to human health or the environment, or if it could show that there had been procedural irregularities. Since the French Agriculture Ministry had made no such submission, it was bound to implement the Commission's directive.

According to Greenpeace, however, the ministry did possess relevant new information that it could have made available to the European Commission, but chose not to. That information relates to the inclusion of a marker gene resistant to the antibiotic ampicillin in the genetic construction of these corn varieties. The environmentalists intend to contest the ruling.

The chief characteristic of the three varieties of transgenic corn in question is that they all contain a gene resistant to the insecticide Bt-176, which is used to combat the corn borer, a pyralid butterfly whose caterpillar can devastate corn crops. But the council's ruling is likely to apply to 12 other varieties of transgenic corn produced by Syngenta and Monsanto that were placed on the official list in August 1998 and still are authorized, by extending their period of authorization from three to 10 years as well.

Theoretically, Syngenta, which was born out of the merger between Novartis Seeds and the agro-chemical division of AstraZeneca, now has the right to resume selling the three corn varieties in France until February 2008. But the company described the Council of State's ruling as a "nonevent" since a dozen varieties of GM corn were already authorized, and that French farmers stopped planting transgenic seeds more than a year ago because of consumer hostility to food containing genetically modified organisms.

According to the Agriculture Ministry, out of the total 3.2 million hectares of land planted with corn in France, the area planted to GM varieties never exceeded 2,000 hectares at its height in 1998. Today it is down to just 80 hectares, and the current plantings are solely for experimental purposes. Moreover, Syngenta has made it clear that it does not plan to resume marketing the seeds in France until there is a demand for them.