Open letter: Deregulation of GMOs/NGTs: Will you approve the destruction of Europe’s agricultural sector and small seed companies by the patents of a few multinationals?

Dear Members of the European Parliament,
Dear Representatives of the Member States to the EU,
Dear Commissioners for Health and Internal market,

On behalf of the European peasants’ organisations represented by the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC), we would like to ask you about the future of European peasant farming: Will you allow the appropriation of peasant and traditional seeds by the patents of a few multinational seed companies?

This appropriation of all seeds is what the negotiating mandate adopted by the Council of permanent representatives on 14 March advocates for, by supporting the Commission’s proposal to deregulate new GMOs (obtained by ‘new genomic techniques’ (GMOs/NGTs)), in favour of a handful of multinational biotech companies[1] seeking to control the entire global food chain with their patents.

On 7 February 2024, the European Parliament rejected the patentability of those GMOs/NTGs. The latest version of the proposal put forward by Poland, which has been agreed by the Member States, does not solve the problem of patents. As Members of the European Parliament, you have the responsibility to protect EU citizens, by enforcing this decision and resisting the pressure exerted by the Council, the Commission and the biotech industry in the upcoming trilogue negotiations.

The only objective of the biotech industry, which now seems to have been achieved, is to obtain the abolition of the traceability of ‘new’ GMOs/NTGs, in particular the obligation to publish detection and identification processes of genetic modifications obtained with NGTs.

This would result in:

Considering all of the above, will you let our food security and sovereignty be controlled by six biotech multinationals that already hold the vast majority of GMO/NGTs patents under the control of two or three financial funds?

These patented GMOs will inevitably generate multiple irreversible health, environmental and economic damage, leading to the disappearance of all peasant and traditional seeds and reducing the diversity of small and medium-sized European seed companies which guarantee our sovereignty. When these damages come to light, you will not be able to claim you had not been warned, nor deny your responsibility.

The adaptation of NGTs to climate change and the reduction of chemical pesticides (which will be replaced by genetic pesticides) are false promises: they are the same as those used to impose transgenic GMOs in the 1990s. These promises never came true, but instead only served to sell more herbicides, contaminate traditional and organic seeds with patented genes, and increase the price of seeds for farmers.

In view of the European Parliament’s position in favour of a patent ban on NGTs, ECVC calls on the Members of the Environment Committee of the European Parliament to not approve the negotiating mandate to open the trilogue on this file.

Sincerely,
ECVC Coordinating Committee

[1] Today, six multinationals share the vast majority of the global seed market: Bayer, Corteva, BASF, Syngenta/ChemChina, Limagrain, KWS. Of these, Bayer and Corteva own 80% of the patents on genetic modification techniques.