Viewpoint: While most of Europe remains in thrall of crop biotechnology rejectionism, sustainability promises of CRISPR gene editing may soon lead to…

The European Commission recently published a report on new genomic techniques, including CRISPR gene editing, which was expected to havemajor implications for their regulation in the European Union (EU). As of today, the EU is blocking the introduction of next generation crops, regulating them as GMOs, which means theyve been all but banned under the continents precautionary principle-infused regulatory system.

Developers and supporters of gene editing technologies thought the report would accelerate the introduction of these products in the European market. However, far from introducing a strategy to end the European deadlock on these new biotechnologies, this report only announced further discussions. Further, EU political inaction may well comfort the leaders of China and the United States on these biotechnologies, two countries that are rushing to exploit these cutting edge tools.

New gene technologies hold promise in agriculture, industry and medicine, and the European Commission report recognizes this. In fact, the pioneering scientists involved with the most popular gene editing techniques (termed CRISPR-Cas), Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, were awarded with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

It cannot have escaped the attention of the Europe Commission that the continent is trailing far behind the US and China in all applied areas of these technologies. It is also obvious that the EU regulation of GMOs (a legal concept, often denounced by scientists as having no scientific or technical basis) has contributed to the backlash on these GMOs, which mainly aretransgenic plants. There is at least one consensus in this dossier: if these new genomic techniques are regulated as GMOs, it will not be possible to develop them for commercial purposes in Europe, and costly obstacles will have to be overcome before import is authorized.

A previous European official report (in 2011) already stated that The legislative framework as it operates today is not meeting needs or expectations, or its own objectives. But nothing has been done to solve the problem at the EU political level. What happened was actually quite the opposite: the regulatory burden increased further, while leaving uncertainties about the future of new biotechnologies. Inevitably, when politicians are inactive, the power of judges increases, and this happened in the EU. In 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concluded that a broad category of biotechnologies known as mutagenesis are GMOs and are, in principle, subject to the obligations laid down by the GMO Directive.

This means that these new genomic techniques, which often are mutagenesis techniques (they surgically modify genetic traits), fall within the scope of the EU GMO legislation. The current report by the European Commission was expected toprovide answers on how to overcome this major difficulty. It has not.

The pro-biotech side may be satisfied in the short term, because this report explicitly recognizes that products of new genomic techniques

have the potential to contribute to the objectives of the EUs Green Deal and in particular to the farm to fork and biodiversity strategies and the United Nations sustainable development goals.

The EUs proposedGreen Deal has the ambitious aim to make Europe the first climate neutral continent. Reactions from supporters of organic and regenerative agriculture, who are unequivocally opposed to biotechnology, were negative. According to IFOAM Organics Europe:

A weakening of the rules on the use of genetic engineering in agriculture and food is worrying news and could leave organic food systems unprotected including their ability to trace GMOs throughout the food chain to avoid contaminations that lead to economic losses and to live up to organic quality standards and consumer expectations. Organic producers urge the Commission and the Member States to maintain the existing regulatory framework and seriously consider the impact of the proposed regulatory scenario on organic food & farming, consumer choice and access to agrobiodiversity.

The rest is here:
Viewpoint: While most of Europe remains in thrall of crop biotechnology rejectionism, sustainability promises of CRISPR gene editing may soon lead to...