Genetic engineering in agriculture – where is Rösti's openness to technology?
Genetic engineering in agriculture – where is Rösti's openness to technology?
Monday, February 10, 2025
The Federal Council recently recommended a five-year extension of the moratorium on genetic engineering from the end of 2025, i.e. until the end of 2030. In doing so, it went further than the National Council's Commission for Science, Education and Culture (WBK), which had proposed a two-year extension until the end of 2027 in the autumn.
A five-year moratorium and a technology ban – how does that fit with the assurances that Switzerland is a leader in innovation? How does it fit with Federal Councillor Rösti's usual talk of openness to technology? How dare the government hinder Switzerland in the development of plant breeding, to keep it in prison? Beat Gygi addresses these questions in his report in Weltwoche.
In 2005, a popular initiative to that effect led to a moratorium banning the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. It was limited in time, but has since been extended four times, most recently until the end of 2025 – at least with a spark of hope for innovation.
At the same time, the Federal Council was to draw up new rules for the approval of plants from new breeding technologies. What is behind this?
More recently, new genetic engineering methods have been invented that allow individual genes to be inserted at specific points in the genome or to be switched on or off in a targeted manner much more precisely than before. The same thing happens in breeding, but faster. This type of breeding is also called ‘genome editing’, as in the redaction of a book. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna received the Nobel Prize in 2020 for the CRISPR-Cas method.
Contrary to earlier expectations, the Federal Council is not yet ready with the new rules of the game; it does not want to deliver the message on the new law until the first quarter of 2026.
However, the fact that it now wants to extend the moratorium by a full five years instead of two, as the National Council Commission wants, means that agriculture will be paralysed for a long time and there will be serious losses in the food sector. Again: why is the government provoking such damage?
It is related to the problem that the French economist and politician Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) saw early on: it is about what you see and what you don't see.
What we can see: the conspicuous effects of the ban on genetic engineering are the political and economic successes of the opponents of genetic engineering, who capitalise on them. Opponents from the agricultural sector can thus keep competitors out of the product markets, agricultural politicians can win votes, extra-parliamentary commissions can live out their ideology, and the ban helps donation-dependent NGOs to collect money.
What is not seen: the official paralysis of breeding activity prevents new varieties that make crops such as potatoes, wheat or corn more resistant to fungi, pests or drought. What's more, if the farming population only makes up 2 per cent, their problems in the field are not an issue at all, since the shelves are always full. So an improvement in food supply that is actually possible does not materialise. That is what you don't see.
What you see has a stronger effect in politics: the staging of anti-genetic engineering sentiment – first comes morality, then food.
Beat Gygi is a journalist at Weltwoche. This article was first published in Weltwoche on 5 February.
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