The European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment voted for the deregulation of plants obtained from new genetic engineering (or new genomic techniques, NGTs). According to EU plans, environmental risk assessment for NGT plants will only be mandatory in very rare cases. In particular, an arbitrary threshold of 20 genetic changes would become a central part of the future regulation. According to current estimates, more than 90 percent of all NGT plants could enter the market without mandatory environmental risk assessment.
If finally agreed, the regulation will also apply for wild plant species that can spread within natural populations. Many environmental risks associated with NGT plants have already been described in scientific literature, such as negative effects on pollinators and food webs, increased invasive potential, weakening of natural plant populations, yield depression, toxicity for insects, unintended effects on soil organisms and endangerment of protected species.
Usage of artificial intelligence (AI) may multiply the risks: Within the proposed new legal framework, AI could be easily used to design NGT plants which stay below the proposed threshold, but nevertheless pose severe environmental risks.
In fact, biotech industry is being given carte blanche for importing and releasing their NGT plants via a fast-track approval, disregarding the consequences for health or the environment. Therefore, with the planned deregulation, the EU is about to hand over its responsibilities for the safe use of the new technologies to free market forces.
This is very much in the interest of big companies such as the US-American Corteva, the world’s most important player in patent applications on NGT plants. According to companies, NGTs can be considered as a disruptive technology in economy. However, form the perspective of the protection of health and the environment, this is the core problem: insufficiently controlled releases of genetically engineered organisms may disrupt our livelihoods and the future of biodiversity in Europe.
The most important NGT tools are gene scissors such as CRISPR/Cas that can overcome many constraints in conventional breeding. Gene scissors are recombinant enzymatic mutagens that can introduce gene variants and combinations that were previously unknown and are also virtually impossible to result from conventional breeding methods. To achieve this, it is often enough to introduce a small number of genetic changes. These genotypes and the resulting NGT plants have to be considered as ‘new to the environment’ and consequently must be subjected to risk assessment. In this regard, the planned new regulation would largely fail. However, the new regulation still has to take some further voting hurdles in the EU Council and the Parliament before being adopted.
Contact:
Christoph Then, info@testbiotech.org, Tel + 49 151 54638040