The European Commission’s proposal to widely deregulate the new generation of Genetically Modified Organisms (new GMOs) – now called New Genomic Techniques or NGTs for political purposes – plans to take away farmers’, food processors’, retailers’ and consumers’ right to be informed whether the feed and food they buy contains new GMOs.
The law proposal of the EU Commission is one that meets the demands of the agribusiness lobby rather than its citizens’ best interests. Studies show that, as long as consumers have the information whether their food contains GMOs or not, they prefer to choose conventional, organic or GMO-free options.
So far discussions mainly focus on how risky or safe new GMOs are, or could be. However, the question that is at least as important for farmers, food processors, food retail and consumers, is that of how new GMOs must be labelled.
As the Commission’s proposal heads towards the European Parliament for debates, we updated our initial briefing launched before the publication of the proposal, assessing the risks of the proposed far-reaching European new GMOs label deregulation.
