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On 6 May, final nego­ti­a­tions will begin on the dereg­u­la­tion of plants engi­neered using new genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tion (GM) tech­niques, such as CRISPR/Cas. Dur­ing so-called tri­logue talks, the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, Coun­cil of Min­is­ters and Euro­pean Com­mis­sion will finalise an agreed ver­sion of the pro­posed Reg­u­la­tion on plants obtained through “new genom­ic tech­niques” (NGT).

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On Fri­day 14 March, the 27 EU mem­ber states reached an agree­ment on the dereg­u­la­tion of plants pro­duced using new genet­ic engi­neer­ing tech­niques, known as “new genom­ic tech­niques”. A qual­i­fied major­i­ty of mem­ber states backed the com­pro­mise pro­pos­al put for­ward by the Pol­ish EU pres­i­den­cy. Many agri­cul­tur­al and envi­ron­men­tal organ­i­sa­tions had crit­i­cised the pro­pos­al.

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In a joint state­ment, more than 200 organ­i­sa­tions bring­ing togeth­er small-scale and organ­ic breed­ers, farm­ers’ organ­i­sa­tions, food retail­ers, and civ­il soci­ety groups —includ­ing Save Our Seeds — are urg­ing the EU insti­tu­tions to reject the pro­posed dereg­u­la­tion of gene-edit­ed plants.

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The increas­ing use of gen­er­a­tive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) tools is dri­ving a pro­found trans­for­ma­tion in plant genet­ic engi­neer­ing. The report ‘When chat­bots breed new vari­eties’ by Ben­no Vogel sum­maris­es the state of the art in rela­tion to plant breed­ing. How should sci­en­tists and reg­u­la­tors deal with the emerg­ing new chal­lenges?

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