- This briefing is part of a series dissecting who will benefit from the draft EU law to deregulate new GMOs, and who will suffer from it.
Currently, just a handful of corporations control more than 60 percent of the global commercial seed market. Biotech industry giants, particularly Corteva, have secured significant control over patents for certain gene editing techniques called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), expanding their control over the plant patent landscape. While patented seeds have played a limited role in Europe’s breeding and farming sectors, this is now changing with the development of new GMOs as they will further strengthen corporate control over farmers and breeders.
The issue of patents on new GMOs and their impacts on the breeding sector and farmers’ access to seeds is central in EU decision makers’ deregulation discussions. However, the text agreed upon by the EU Parliament and the draft of the agriculture ministers fail to offer a real solution to these problems.
Read our new briefing to learn more about who stands to win and who stands to lose from the patent rules proposed under the deregulation plans.
