“The GMO industry is based on a unique economy, that of the eternally renewed promise”
That’s the headline of an excellent article by the journalist Stéphane Foucart in Le Monde. He writes: “In 1996, the first generation of genetically modified seeds appeared in North American fields, leaving the European Union (EU) rather sceptical about the industry's promises. Three decades later, the EU has changed and is preparing to open the door wide to ‘new GMOs’ – plants derived from ‘new genomic techniques’ (NGTs). These could enter the market without environmental or health risk assessments, without traceability, without consumer labelling, and without any provisions for coexistence with conventional crops... The promoters of these new technologies promise reduced inputs, higher yields, crops adapted to high temperatures, droughts, pathogens, etc. But there is a sense of déjà vu here: in the late 1990s, the same arguments, sometimes word for word, were put forward by the promoters of the first generations of GMOs. Thirty years later, what GMOs have done to American agriculture – which has widely adopted them – is the opposite.” |
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Gene-edited plants developed and tested in labs and greenhouses before release carry risks – as numerous scientific papers attest. Yet outdoor gene editing poses even more serious risks – including that active gene editing tools could end up altering the genomes of humans and other living organisms in the environment. Some scientists who argue for deregulation of gene editing deny that outdoor gene editing is possible. But patents and the scientific literature tell a very different story. The authors of a new scientific paper on the topic, Prof Jack Heinemann and colleagues, write: “Scalable lab-free genome editing is already firmly in the technological trajectory of molecular biology and agricultural practice.”