Issues relating to EU legislation on GMOs have been bubbling away in the background in recent years. Among the major items discussed were the proposal to allow individual member states the right to reject GM crops for non-scientific reasons, plus the ongoing evaluation of a range of new plant breeding technologies and whether or not they should be governed by existing GM legislation.
Most Irish farmers will be aware that GM crops are not produced in Ireland. But in fact there are very few GM crop options that can be produced in Ireland because the traits currently being grown commercially arise from foreign genes inserted into crops like soyabeans, maize, cotton, oilseed rape, sugar beet, alfalfa, papaya, squash, etc, – most are not your everyday crop options for our climate.
However, herbicide-tolerant varieties of oilseed rape now exist, which are not GM, and these can be grown in Ireland.
Crops like oilseed rape do not have a massive need for either Roundup Ready or Liberty Link herbicide traits, as we have a reasonable range of herbicides available for use currently. So we need not feel deprived of the option to grow these old GM technology crops, which use genes inserted from other species to bring new traits to a crop that might not otherwise be possible.
Virtually all of the GM crops grown around the world today provide either herbicide tolerance, to the use of glyphosate or glufosinate, or insect tolerance through the production of natural insecticides within the plant.
All of these traits were produced through the insertion of a gene from different bacteria which either break down the target herbicide in the crop plants or they produce insecticide substances within the plant to protect them from insect attack.
Technology has moved on from these initial developments. The experiences gained from the many years of research have helped develop new technologies which can alter plant behaviour and help variety performance in many different ways. Perhaps the most basic is the arrival of herbicide tolerance in oilseed rape which has been bred into varieties by conventional breeding techniques and so is not a GM crop.
An example would be the Clearfield oilseed rape varieties which fall outside of GM legislation in the EU. But in countries like Canada, these must be tested by the regulatory system because the legislation there monitors the safety of the novel trait rather than the technology.
Transgenic gene transfer involves genes from one species being inserted into another species to produce a specific end-use trait, an occurrence which is unlikely to happen in nature.
Initially GM crops gave rise to suggestions of potential risk in terms of food or feed safety. When no food safety issues were scientifically proven, the focus moved to environmental concerns. Scientific research was used to develop strategies for the controlled production of GM crops. But there are still calls for the removal from the market of these transgenic crops in the EU, even though there are currently no real alternatives, especially for the supply of animal protein.
Legislative logjam
Most members of the scientific community are of a view that the precautionary principle that was included in the initial GM legislation was justified, given the novel nature of these genetically altered crops. However, the passage of time has not found any identifiable problems associated with GM crops and science has evolved to produce even more focused tools for genetic improvement which do not involve gene transfer across species.
The problem is that these new biotech tools are also controlled by the same GM legislation and so they are also blocked by this legislative framework. This is highly frustrating for people who see new tools for plant breeding which could help to seriously focus natural plant resistance against many troublesome pests like diseases and insects. And many of these solutions do not require alteration of the natural DNA in the plant, which also means that they cannot be tested.
Many of the new breeding tools produce the same end product that is possible through standard conventional breeding.
However, because they are more targeted and more precise, one is more likely to achieve an altered version of a market-ready variety. Conventional cross breeding must produce a series of new individual varieties which must then be evaluated from scratch for each individual characteristic. This takes time and there is no guarantee that the desired characteristic will be successfully combined with the others needed to make a new commercial variety.
The use of gene markers was developed in the early years of GM and these are now used in conventional breeding. These help in that they enable breeders to check for the presence of the desirable gene very early in the evaluation process of a new variety.
Since then, many new biotech tools have been developed for breeding. However, these are controlled by current GM legislation in the EU which makes them unattractive to plant breeders. And negative sentiment towards GM continue to prevent the realignment and modernisation of the EU’s GM legislation.
In my opinion, the fate of the new breeding technologies is of far greater consequence for Ireland than the older transgenic crops. The Commission is currently examining all these new tools and it is set to publish a legal analysis by the end of this year. This is to define whether crops bred using these new techniques should fall under EU law on genetically modified (GM) organisms.
This report and evaluation is likely to have a major impact on the future of the plant-breeding sector. Breeders insist that new gene-editing techniques should not be considered as GM and that they should not be subject to the current approval process in the EU.
Breeders argue that if the new breeding methods, which include very complex processes called oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis, zinc finger nucleases, cisgenesis, intragenesis, etc, are to be subject to existing GM rules, then they remain less attractive for use in the EU. If they must comply, then they will need to comply with prior authorisation, labelling, etc, and this would make them less appealing for use in European markets.
A number of countries are arguing that some of these less controversial new breeding techniques should not fall under the EU’s strict GM rules. One specific example refers to cisgenesis, a technique which modifies plants with naturally occurring genes from the same species. The Teagasc work on potato blight resistance at Oak Park is using a potato variety that was modified by cisgenesis.
While EU GM laws have consequences for the competitiveness of plant breeders, and for agricultural trade, it is emphasised that the Commission’s evaluation will be an objective and technical analysis only. This seems reasonable once it is based on technical and scientific evaluation because Europe’s farmers do not want the additional risk of future health or environment scares.
Individual country rulings
Earlier this year, a proposal was passed within the EU allowing individual member states the right to ban the cultivation of GM crops on their territory. Having this option would, in theory, enable individual member states to be more flexible in their attitude to the modernisation of the current GM legislation, which is now 30 years old.
While a ban on cultivation by individual states might also be seen as a potential infringement of free trade within the EU, the parliament deemed this acceptable because of a potential risk to the environment or the image of those countries.
EU legislation on GM is badly in need of reform and it is possible that opposing member states will continue to object to all matters relating to GM. This may be seen by the fact that the countries that were given the right to object to GM crop cultivation on purely political grounds subsequently demanded the right to ban the importation of GM food/feed.
It was hoped that the initial proposal would trigger a genuine debate on the divisive attitude to biotech crops within the EU which would act to unlock the stalemate in the current decision-making process with regard to GM imports.
The proposal to give individual member states the power to block the importation of GM feeds, like soyabean meal for animal protein, was actually proposed by the Commission. However, this was blocked by a vote of the European Parliament last week. This proposal was justified by the fact that, in doing so, it would interfere with the internal free market. And of course this is correct, but how is it fundamentally different to allowing some countries to grow GM crops while others can prevent this action?
These comments are not to be confused with a request to grow the current GM crops as we don’t have any good fits or reasonable expectation of benefit. However, it must be regarded as hypocritical of our legislators to choose to ban cultivation of GM crops in some countries while preventing them from controlling imports for use in animal feed.
The fact that Ireland does not produce any of the existing range of GM crops means that this is not really an issue. However, given our dependence on costly chemical inputs to control a range of pests and diseases, improved genetic resistance, engineered by skilled plant breeders, could significantly reduce our dependence on this element of cost.
New variety improvements are possible which may only need to manipulate the natural genetic make-up of a plant and which may help reduce some of the significant cost factor required to secure the level of quality required in today’s market.
Many of these technologies use the plant’s natural DNA but engineer it slightly to alter traits, such as to reduce the need for inputs or to enable the delivery of consistently higher yield potential. There are now a range of technologies possible which range from cisgenesis (bringing genes into a plant from another of the same plant species) right through to gene editing, which is altering the operational genes within an organism to produce a different effect.
If the Commission report concludes that a specific technology need not be bound by the current cumbersome GM legislation, it is inevitable that this biotech tool will become widely used in the plant breeding sector.
The availability of such tools is very important as they would act as a catalyst for investment in small grain cereals and other crops to help drive progress. The hope is that increased availability and use of these novel breeding tools would add to variety improvement and yield potential over time to help the competitiveness of EU agriculture.
Change is essential
The passage of time is increasing the challenges faced by both growers and their chemical tools. Production costs continue to increase and our chemical tools are challenged both by nature, in terms of plant weed and insect resistance, and by the decreasing number of products available for use.
We continue to be faced with more aggressive pathogens, such as the potato late blight fungus. Many of our existing cereal fungicide actives are being challenged by increasing levels of disease resistance. And climate change may well bring even more aggressive diseases in the future.
As things stand, there are unlikely to be many alternative solutions to improved genetic resistance, which must be generated through the tools of modern plant breeding.
Earlier this year the EU enabled individual member states the option to decide on whether GM crops would be grown on its territory or not.Last week the European Parliament strongly rejected a Commission proposal to allow individual member states the right to ban GM food and feed imports.The Commission is shortly to produce a report on whether individual biotechnology tools can be used in plant breeding outside of current GM legislation.
Issues relating to EU legislation on GMOs have been bubbling away in the background in recent years. Among the major items discussed were the proposal to allow individual member states the right to reject GM crops for non-scientific reasons, plus the ongoing evaluation of a range of new plant breeding technologies and whether or not they should be governed by existing GM legislation.
Most Irish farmers will be aware that GM crops are not produced in Ireland. But in fact there are very few GM crop options that can be produced in Ireland because the traits currently being grown commercially arise from foreign genes inserted into crops like soyabeans, maize, cotton, oilseed rape, sugar beet, alfalfa, papaya, squash, etc, – most are not your everyday crop options for our climate.
However, herbicide-tolerant varieties of oilseed rape now exist, which are not GM, and these can be grown in Ireland.
Crops like oilseed rape do not have a massive need for either Roundup Ready or Liberty Link herbicide traits, as we have a reasonable range of herbicides available for use currently. So we need not feel deprived of the option to grow these old GM technology crops, which use genes inserted from other species to bring new traits to a crop that might not otherwise be possible.
Virtually all of the GM crops grown around the world today provide either herbicide tolerance, to the use of glyphosate or glufosinate, or insect tolerance through the production of natural insecticides within the plant.
All of these traits were produced through the insertion of a gene from different bacteria which either break down the target herbicide in the crop plants or they produce insecticide substances within the plant to protect them from insect attack.
Technology has moved on from these initial developments. The experiences gained from the many years of research have helped develop new technologies which can alter plant behaviour and help variety performance in many different ways. Perhaps the most basic is the arrival of herbicide tolerance in oilseed rape which has been bred into varieties by conventional breeding techniques and so is not a GM crop.
An example would be the Clearfield oilseed rape varieties which fall outside of GM legislation in the EU. But in countries like Canada, these must be tested by the regulatory system because the legislation there monitors the safety of the novel trait rather than the technology.
Transgenic gene transfer involves genes from one species being inserted into another species to produce a specific end-use trait, an occurrence which is unlikely to happen in nature.
Initially GM crops gave rise to suggestions of potential risk in terms of food or feed safety. When no food safety issues were scientifically proven, the focus moved to environmental concerns. Scientific research was used to develop strategies for the controlled production of GM crops. But there are still calls for the removal from the market of these transgenic crops in the EU, even though there are currently no real alternatives, especially for the supply of animal protein.
Legislative logjam
Most members of the scientific community are of a view that the precautionary principle that was included in the initial GM legislation was justified, given the novel nature of these genetically altered crops. However, the passage of time has not found any identifiable problems associated with GM crops and science has evolved to produce even more focused tools for genetic improvement which do not involve gene transfer across species.
The problem is that these new biotech tools are also controlled by the same GM legislation and so they are also blocked by this legislative framework. This is highly frustrating for people who see new tools for plant breeding which could help to seriously focus natural plant resistance against many troublesome pests like diseases and insects. And many of these solutions do not require alteration of the natural DNA in the plant, which also means that they cannot be tested.
Many of the new breeding tools produce the same end product that is possible through standard conventional breeding.
However, because they are more targeted and more precise, one is more likely to achieve an altered version of a market-ready variety. Conventional cross breeding must produce a series of new individual varieties which must then be evaluated from scratch for each individual characteristic. This takes time and there is no guarantee that the desired characteristic will be successfully combined with the others needed to make a new commercial variety.
The use of gene markers was developed in the early years of GM and these are now used in conventional breeding. These help in that they enable breeders to check for the presence of the desirable gene very early in the evaluation process of a new variety.
Since then, many new biotech tools have been developed for breeding. However, these are controlled by current GM legislation in the EU which makes them unattractive to plant breeders. And negative sentiment towards GM continue to prevent the realignment and modernisation of the EU’s GM legislation.
In my opinion, the fate of the new breeding technologies is of far greater consequence for Ireland than the older transgenic crops. The Commission is currently examining all these new tools and it is set to publish a legal analysis by the end of this year. This is to define whether crops bred using these new techniques should fall under EU law on genetically modified (GM) organisms.
This report and evaluation is likely to have a major impact on the future of the plant-breeding sector. Breeders insist that new gene-editing techniques should not be considered as GM and that they should not be subject to the current approval process in the EU.
Breeders argue that if the new breeding methods, which include very complex processes called oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis, zinc finger nucleases, cisgenesis, intragenesis, etc, are to be subject to existing GM rules, then they remain less attractive for use in the EU. If they must comply, then they will need to comply with prior authorisation, labelling, etc, and this would make them less appealing for use in European markets.
A number of countries are arguing that some of these less controversial new breeding techniques should not fall under the EU’s strict GM rules. One specific example refers to cisgenesis, a technique which modifies plants with naturally occurring genes from the same species. The Teagasc work on potato blight resistance at Oak Park is using a potato variety that was modified by cisgenesis.
While EU GM laws have consequences for the competitiveness of plant breeders, and for agricultural trade, it is emphasised that the Commission’s evaluation will be an objective and technical analysis only. This seems reasonable once it is based on technical and scientific evaluation because Europe’s farmers do not want the additional risk of future health or environment scares.
Individual country rulings
Earlier this year, a proposal was passed within the EU allowing individual member states the right to ban the cultivation of GM crops on their territory. Having this option would, in theory, enable individual member states to be more flexible in their attitude to the modernisation of the current GM legislation, which is now 30 years old.
While a ban on cultivation by individual states might also be seen as a potential infringement of free trade within the EU, the parliament deemed this acceptable because of a potential risk to the environment or the image of those countries.
EU legislation on GM is badly in need of reform and it is possible that opposing member states will continue to object to all matters relating to GM. This may be seen by the fact that the countries that were given the right to object to GM crop cultivation on purely political grounds subsequently demanded the right to ban the importation of GM food/feed.
It was hoped that the initial proposal would trigger a genuine debate on the divisive attitude to biotech crops within the EU which would act to unlock the stalemate in the current decision-making process with regard to GM imports.
The proposal to give individual member states the power to block the importation of GM feeds, like soyabean meal for animal protein, was actually proposed by the Commission. However, this was blocked by a vote of the European Parliament last week. This proposal was justified by the fact that, in doing so, it would interfere with the internal free market. And of course this is correct, but how is it fundamentally different to allowing some countries to grow GM crops while others can prevent this action?
These comments are not to be confused with a request to grow the current GM crops as we don’t have any good fits or reasonable expectation of benefit. However, it must be regarded as hypocritical of our legislators to choose to ban cultivation of GM crops in some countries while preventing them from controlling imports for use in animal feed.
The fact that Ireland does not produce any of the existing range of GM crops means that this is not really an issue. However, given our dependence on costly chemical inputs to control a range of pests and diseases, improved genetic resistance, engineered by skilled plant breeders, could significantly reduce our dependence on this element of cost.
New variety improvements are possible which may only need to manipulate the natural genetic make-up of a plant and which may help reduce some of the significant cost factor required to secure the level of quality required in today’s market.
Many of these technologies use the plant’s natural DNA but engineer it slightly to alter traits, such as to reduce the need for inputs or to enable the delivery of consistently higher yield potential. There are now a range of technologies possible which range from cisgenesis (bringing genes into a plant from another of the same plant species) right through to gene editing, which is altering the operational genes within an organism to produce a different effect.
If the Commission report concludes that a specific technology need not be bound by the current cumbersome GM legislation, it is inevitable that this biotech tool will become widely used in the plant breeding sector.
The availability of such tools is very important as they would act as a catalyst for investment in small grain cereals and other crops to help drive progress. The hope is that increased availability and use of these novel breeding tools would add to variety improvement and yield potential over time to help the competitiveness of EU agriculture.
Change is essential
The passage of time is increasing the challenges faced by both growers and their chemical tools. Production costs continue to increase and our chemical tools are challenged both by nature, in terms of plant weed and insect resistance, and by the decreasing number of products available for use.
We continue to be faced with more aggressive pathogens, such as the potato late blight fungus. Many of our existing cereal fungicide actives are being challenged by increasing levels of disease resistance. And climate change may well bring even more aggressive diseases in the future.
As things stand, there are unlikely to be many alternative solutions to improved genetic resistance, which must be generated through the tools of modern plant breeding.
Earlier this year the EU enabled individual member states the option to decide on whether GM crops would be grown on its territory or not.Last week the European Parliament strongly rejected a Commission proposal to allow individual member states the right to ban GM food and feed imports.The Commission is shortly to produce a report on whether individual biotechnology tools can be used in plant breeding outside of current GM legislation. 
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