After 18 months, governments have yet to agree on when a new class of genetically modified crops can be treated as equivalent to conventional strains, and whether producers should be granted monopoly rights through patents.
Warsaw is looking to move forward a stalled proposal to remove a new generation of gene-edited plants from the stringent EU licensing and traceability requirements applied to conventional genetically modified organisms (GMO), leaked documents show.
The European Commission proposed in July 2023 that crops created using ‘new genomic techniques’ (NGT) should be excluded from strict regulation under the 2001 GMO Regulation, but governments have been unable to agree on how exactly to define such products, and whether they should be patentable.
Just a week after it took over the chair of intergovernmental policy talks as holder of the rotating EU Council presidency, Warsaw wants to discard a call by Hungary to reopen the entire policy discussion – reverting instead to an earlier outline of the definition and focusing on the patent issue.
The Commission wants to create a new ‘category 1’ for such crops, which would be deemed largely equivalent to conventionally bred plants under EU law.
This would mean exemption from the strict regulation that will continue to apply to first generation GMOs, where an entire foreign gene has been inserted to confer new properties such as pesticide resistance or longer shelf life.
The current law allows governments in the EU to ban the cultivation of GMOs on their territory – a derogation that nearly all member states, with the notably exception of Spain, are using.
“It is clear to the current Presidency that only by addressing concerns linked to the existence of patents on plants obtained by NGT the qualified majority may be reached,” Polish officials write in a cover note to a compromise proposal dated 7 January and seen by Euronews.
They suggest designation as category 1 should be based “exclusively on the biological features” and not on whether or not it has been patented. The European Parliament, which has already adopted its position on the proposal, wants to bar all such plants from patent protection to prevent monopolies.
For Astrid Österreicher, an EU policy specialist with the German think tank TestBiotech, this divergence from the parliament’s position would do little to limit the power of large agrochemical firms – one of the key concerns of opponents to GM crops.
“This no solution to the ongoing concentration/monopolisation in the seed market,” Österreicher said.
Environmentalists are also critical of the idea that the threshold for designating an NGT crop strain as equivalent to a conventionally bred plant can be set at a certain number of molecules in its genome.
Poland was “still following the wrong idea that there might be a general threshold for effects caused by NGT processes”, Österreicher said – a reference to the Commission’s proposed limit of 20 nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA.
Even small tweaks to a plant’s genome could confer undesirable or dangerous properties, she said, arguing that all new strains should be subject to a thorough risk assessment.
Government delegates are slated to discuss the Polish compromise text behind closed doors in Brussels on 20 January. Agreement at the ministerial level will be needed before the Council can enter final negotiations with the European Parliament.
