ECVC celebrates a first victory against GMO/NGT deregulation

For more than a decade, ECVC has been denouncing the false claims of the European Commission, which claims that new GMOs (which are all patented) would be similar to what happens in nature, even though European legislation prohibits the patenting of nature[2]. With this deregulation project, the Commission seeks to validate this false claim, aiming not only to force consumers to buy GMOs they do not want, but also to allow the patents of a few multinationals, which already control any use of new genetic techniques, to confiscate all peasant and traditional seeds. The Commission is now caught up in its own trap: this essential issue, which it did not wish to take into account, blocks any agreement in the Council.

For its part, the European Parliament has also heard the alerts from ECVC and a broad coalition of civil society organisations, and has adopted amendments that require changes to the rules of the European Patent Office (EPO). But the European Union cannot adopt them without the agreement of the third-country members of the EPO and non-members of the Union (Switzerland, Norway, Turkey etc.). This is therefore not implementable on the will of the EU alone. Parliament voted on this matter before having the results of the Commission study that aims to assess the impact of the changes, announced for 2025, and the “compromise solution” it found have to be followed by further negotiations in the trilogue and then in the EPO before any possible decision. This process would take several years and leave farmers and people unprotected in case of patent disputes. This is especially relevant given that the issue of patents on the native traits of seeds is also relevant to the current debates in the European Parliament on the proposal for new seeds marketing regulations.

Moreover, these false claims are not the only examples of misinformation openly presented by the Commission. It also claimed that there is no basis for distinguishing new GMOs from seeds derived from traditional breeding and that it is therefore not justified to subject them to the requirements of health and environmental risk assessment, traceability and post-market surveillance. The French Agency for Health Security, ANSES, recently published two opinions stating the opposite : any genetic modification resulting from these new techniques can generate the same health and environmental risks as the changes resulting from transgenesis, any new GMO can be detected and therefore traced to be removed in case of post-marketing risks unidentified during the screening assessment. This also means that they can be labeled to guarantee the freedom of choice for farmers and consumers.

The current Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU is still seeking a partial compromise with the incoming Hungarian and Polish Presidencies, which have already expressed their opposition to this proposal for GMO deregulation. Faced with so many lies, contradictions and procedural manoeuvres, ECVC calls on the Council to reject the proposal definitively.

[1] This is the term used by the European Commission to refer to new genetic modification techniques, which are currently regulated by EU GMO legislation.
[2] Similarly, only technical processes are patentable, not essentially biological ones.