As if there was no time limit in this country

As if there was no time limit in this country

The EU has been stuck on the regulation of new breeding technologies for years. Switzerland is also missing out on developments. While innovative approaches are already being used commercially worldwide, Europe and Switzerland lack clear rules – with far-reaching consequences for local farmers, breeders and seed propagators, as well as for global trade.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

The EU is in no hurry to regulate new breeding technologies. For years, there have been discussions about how to deal with these innovative approaches in the European Union. And to date, it seems that no solution has been found that can command a majority. A proposal from the EU Commission is actually on the table that should have been implemented long ago. This would like to introduce two categories of breeding: the first would include plants that have been bred using the new genomic breeding technologies, but without the introduction of foreign DNA. These would be exempt from the requirements of the current genetic engineering law and could therefore be approved and freely traded very quickly. The second category would include those products and plants that contain foreign DNA. These would be dealt with under genetic engineering legislation.


Switzerland is also moving at a snail's pace

As early as 2021, Parliament instructed the Federal Council to draw up a risk-based regulation for the authorisation of plants from new breeding technologies. According to the legal text, it would have had to do this by the summer of 2024. However, a corresponding draft law is now not planned until 2026. Due to this delay, the commission proposed extending the moratorium on genetic engineering, which expires at the end of 2025, by two years. This is to prevent a legal gap from arising with regard to the new breeding technologies. Now the Federal Council is delaying a risk-based authorisation even further and wants to extend the moratorium on genetic engineering unchanged until 2030. Whether parliament will approve the Federal Council's snail mail is at least questionable.

The implementation of risk-based legislation in Switzerland and the EU is a long way off. At the same time, breeders worldwide are embracing the new breeding technologies on a large scale. According to TopAgrar, commercial use already exists in many countries and the strong growth in this sector will continue. The music has long since been playing elsewhere.


No more distinctions possible

And this also increases the pressure to finally regulate with a view to the future. For example, Jaana Kleinschmit von Lengefeld, President of the Association of the Oilseed Processing Industry in Germany (OVID), points out in an article on the ‘topagrar.com’ platform that the EU has an annual import requirement of around 30 million tonnes of soya (meal) to meet its own protein needs. This soy comes from South America, among other places, where many countries have also approved the new breeding technologies for soy cultivation. As a consequence, the reality on the ground is as follows: numerous truckloads from different producers are combined into shipments of up to 80,000 tonnes and shipped globally. It is simply impossible to separate and trace the individual batches, and in extreme cases this can be a major problem for European traders: under the current GMO legislation, the principle of zero tolerance remains in place. In the worst case, traders would be forced to block such destinations that are important for supplying the European market in order to avoid becoming liable for damages themselves.

This example shows that the world of plant breeding continues to move rapidly forward. Innovative methods have long since become established. Only in the committee rooms and council chambers of Europe does it seem that the signs of the times have not been recognised, to the detriment of local farmers, consumers, breeders and seed propagators.

In plant breeding the music plays elsewhere

Innovation is not waiting for the doubters in Europe and Switzerland. Innovative breeding is increasingly taking place elsewhere. The leading countries in this regard are the major agricultural markets such as the USA, Brazil and China. In China, a genome-edited wheat was approved for cultivation in May 2024. The wheat is more resistant to disease and promises higher yields. Overall, China is a leader in the development of genome-edited crops: 509 of the 900 known breeding projects worldwide at the end of May 2024 came from China, according to the Point newsletter from scienceindustries. And continues: ‘Among the important breeding objectives are increased yields, disease resistance, stress tolerance and improved food and feed quality.’

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