Ag and food writer says GMO deregulation lobby live “in a fantasy land of precision, predictability and imagined safety”; points instead to agroecological controls. Report: Claire Robinson
In a letter published in the Dutch KNPV (Royal Netherlands Society of Plant Pathology) member magazine Gewasbescherming (“Crop Protection”, December 2024), Piet Boonekamp, a researcher at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), advocates the use of cisgenesis – the transfer by genetic engineering of genetic material within a particular species – to control Phytophthora, the fungus that causes late blight in potatoes. He argues that the long-standing impasse in removing new GM techniques from “outdated” EU regulations is causing much-needed innovation to stagnate.
Do we need GM – old or new – to combat potato blight? Agriculture and food writer Theo Grent (pictured below) says we don’t. He was invited to respond to Boonekamp’s letter in an article in Gewasbescherming. He wrote, “The letter raised a number of valid points, but it also repeated increasingly common misinformation in support of the pro-GMO agenda, while omitting important data and developments in the agricultural sector.”
An English translation of Grent’s article, which was published in Dutch in Gewasbescherming (May 2025), follows below. In the article, Grent wrote: “Innovation is not stagnating due to EU regulations, but due to a way of thinking that is based on reductionism... Instead of learning from GM's real-life experiences, the deregulation lobby is determined to ignore them and live in a fantasy land of precision, predictability and imagined safety.”
Managing potato blight
When it comes to managing potato blight, what are the agroecological alternatives to GM and toxic fungicide sprays? Grent recommends organic and preventive methods of control: “Always make the most of the period before the disease strikes by always pre-sprouting, planting as early as possible and choosing robust varieties.”
In my own growing, I’ve always followed the methods Grent recommends and can confirm how effective they are. I avoid planting any potatoes meant to be harvested later than “second earlies” (harvested in July or August, before late blight strikes). The Sarpo varieties are well known for their reliable blight resistance and I’ve also found Charlotte to be a reliably blight resistant “second early” variety with a good flavour.
Non-GM potatoes show no need for GM
Interestingly, WUR has a lively non-GM research base as well as a GM one, though the former doesn’t compare to the latter in terms of hype. One of WUR’s research studies showed that non-GM Sarpo potatoes resisted blight as well as a GM “cisgenic” variety especially developed to resist the disease.
WUR’s cisgenic research programme dates back to 2006 and this research was published in 2018. So it took no less than 12 years to establish that the GM variety performed satisfactorily in the controlled environment of a trial. How its blight resistance will withstand fungal pressure in farmers’ fields is not known. And the GM cisgenic potatoes are still not commercially available.
35 years of taxpayer funding wasted on failed GM approaches
Meanwhile Prof Jonathan Jones, a geneticist at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK, has been working for decades on blight-resistant potatoes — first using older-style GM techniques and now using gene editing. This year he said he estimates his product “will be on the shelves in five years”. He added, “The British taxpayer has been funding me to do this work for 35 years”.
Only successive British governments’ pie-in-the-sky ideological obsession with GM could persuade them that this is value for public money. The long delays in producing a GM blight-resistant potato cannot be blamed on GMO regulations – there are blight-affected countries with lax or no GMO regulations in place, and Jones’s issues are clearly R&D problems with the limitations of the technology, not in bringing to market a proven product.
Meanwhile non-GM Sarpo varieties have long been commercially available to growers in the UK and Europe – since the early 2000s. Their blight resistance – which will be the product of many genes working together in a complex network – shows no sign of breaking down.
But here in the UK we don’t see them in the supermarkets. Why not? According to the company that markets Sarpo potatoes, “As most potatoes in UK are retailed via the all powerful supermarkets, we naively thought that they would want to sell our varieties. However, it became clear that supermarkets were not interested in disease resistance as everyone knows that disease is so efficiently controlled by fungicides, albeit at a cost of up to £90m each year in GB. We were often told that our varieties did not show that essential uniformity and beautiful skin finish that the consumer must have.”
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Theo Grent writes in Gewasbescherming:
The idea that we are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about what we are doing and that new developments are therefore safer than comparable developments in the past is a misconception. To me, the letter exudes a typical WUR ideology: short-sightedness bordering on hubris. In my opinion, innovation is not stagnating due to EU regulations, but due to a way of thinking that is based on reductionism.
In industrial language there are no new GMOs, only the products of “new genomic techniques” (NGTs). This attempt to make a distinction is nonsense, of course, because old and new GMOs are all products of genetic engineering, and the newer genetically engineered plants pose similar risks and related problems. Genetic manipulation (GM) and related genetic research are technology, not science. Introducing new genes into plants to selectively kill pests or make them more resistant to herbicides, without considering how such genes might affect the activities of the other tens of thousands of genes, is not science. It is an example of technology gone wild.
Instead of learning from GM's real-life experiences, the deregulation lobby is determined to ignore them and live in a fantasy land of precision, predictability and imagined safety. GMWatch, an organisation opposed to the GMO industry, concludes that the “scalpel and scissors” metaphors used to describe GM methods should be replaced by “child with chainsaw”.
Since we have lost sight of science and safety, this amounts to a shameful attack on the precautionary principle. The criteria used to assess the safety of GM plants are unscientific, arbitrary and nothing more than a political classification. So don’t listen to the industrial hype, because GM means toxic, unsustainable agriculture. Experts have made it very clear that there is no scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs. Nor is the commercial goal to feed the world or improve agriculture. Rather, they exist to obtain intellectual property rights over seeds and plant breeding and to steer agriculture in a direction that benefits agribusiness at the expense of farmers, consumers and the natural world.
Agroecological farming and organic farming weave a story of abundance that does not depend on monocultures, agricultural chemicals or GMOs. Small, diversified farmers already have an incredible amount of knowledge about creating systems that are good for their community, for themselves and for the planet. Instead of reductionistic thinking, we would do better to embrace holistic thinking, for example by working to create healthier soils and everything that goes with it, and by sharing that knowledge as widely as possible. It is really about putting land, seeds and food back into people's hands.
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