Europe is again at a major crossroads between intensive agriculture driven by a new generation of genetically modified plants (new GMOs) and a shift to truly sustainable farming systems.
In the spring of 2023, the European Commission will propose dropping safety and labelling barriers for plants created using new GMO techniques, including CRISPR-CAS9. Officials have been pushed by Bayer and other biotech corporations, which value the honey pot this new technology could represent, but not the normal EU safety tests it would require. This new briefing reveals why removing EU safeguards for new GMOs will raise direct and indirect threats to the environment
The Commission is repeating unrealistic marketing claims and seems ready to accept the environmental risks,which are that new GMOs are less precise than claimed; more risky in the wild; impossible to reverse; threaten the organic sector; and will inevitably intensify industrial agriculture that is a major cause of collapsing biodiversity.
The briefing concludes that new GMOs are a distraction from the real solution to food security and nature recovery: agro-ecological farming.
