Like it or not, gene-edited crops are coming to the EU

This summer’s drought — thought to be Europe’s worst in at least 500 years — wreaked havoc on crops across much of the Continent, parching sunflower fields in Hungary, slashing Spain’s olive harvest by at least a third and threatening the survival of the honey industry in Romania.

As climate change brings increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather, farmers are struggling to adapt.

A growing number of European lawmakers say salvation may be just within reach in the form of genetically engineered super crops.

″Gene-editing techniques are a magnificent tool to ensure that crops need less water, fewer plant protection products and fertilizers, and are more resistant″ to climate change, Spain’s Agriculture Minister Luis Planas told last month's meeting of EU farm ministers in Prague. Planas’ enthusiasm for drought-resistant varieties was echoed by several other ministers and Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski.

Biotech and agrichemical giants like Bayer and Corteva, as well as countless smaller companies and research institutes, say their scientists can tap into gene-editing tools like CRISPR-Cas9 to precisely engineer crops able to withstand even the harshest conditions. They just need EU regulators to give them a chance.

For the moment, the EU has some of the world’s strictest rules when it comes to approving genetically-altered crops, and GMOs remain a divisive topic among governments and citizens alike. As a result, only one GM crop is grown anywhere in the bloc — an insect-resistant variety of corn — and only in Portugal and Spain.

But proponents of gene editing say the technology is nothing like traditional genetic modification because it doesn’t require introducing any foreign genetic material into the crop’s DNA. The industry’s scientists say gene-edited plants would be virtually identical to those obtained using conventional breeding methods — only the technology allows them to obtain specific traits like resistance to drought or pests with a lot more precision.

″You can utilize genome editing to rearrange the DNA that’s already there,″ said Reza Rasoulpour, global regulatory lead for crop protection at Corteva, the U.S. agricultural chemical and seed company. ″It is just a matter of accelerating what would naturally happen in conventional breeding.″

For this reason, the industry believes gene-edited crops should be treated just like conventional ones. But in 2018, to the dismay of the companies and researchers hoping for their big break, the EU’s highest court ruled that gene-edited crops should continue being regulated by the existing GMO framework — with its strict risk assessment mechanisms and labeling requirements.

The ruling prompted the European Commission to issue a study three years later concluding that the regulatory framework was no longer fit for purpose — not least because it was adopted in 2001, long before gene-editing tools like CRISPR-Cas9 were invented.

The Commission's study said that, while the use of gene-editing technologies raises ethical concerns, ″so does missing opportunities as a result of not using them.″

New framework

Now the Commission is mulling a new regulatory framework for crops obtained through gene-editing technologies, which it has dubbed ″new genomic techniques″ (NGTs). A proposal is expected in the first half of next year.

The EU’s biotech industry says the framework would bring much-needed clarity and prompt investment into research on gene-edited crop varieties. But, the industry argues, the regulation needs to be a lot less strict than the current GMO rules to be effective — ideally by following the examples of countries like the U.S. or Japan and doing away with regulatory oversight altogether.

″If the Commission decides to have a risk assessment or a GMO-like [labeling] system, in the end, it will not really make a difference,″ said Petra Jorasch, from the plant-breeding lobby group Euroseeds. ″Our small- and medium-sized companies, especially, are really lagging because they cannot afford a GMO-like system.″

But gene-editing technologies have their fair share of critics as well, who say their allure is based on a lot of ″empty promises.″ Environmental groups, smallholder and organic farmers, among others, argue that allowing the technologies onto the EU market without adequate restraints carries ethical and health risks, and risks fueling the corporate capture of the food system — just two companies, Corteva and Bayer, control 40 percent of the global commercial seeds market.

Corteva, which holds the most patents on gene-editing techniques, was spun out of DowDuPont in 2018. Germany's Bayer, the second largest patent holder, took over Monsanto in 2016, in an ill-fated deal that ended in multibillion-dollar compensation payouts over claims that the U.S. company's Roundup herbicide caused cancer.

″We hear a lot of promises, but the industry is not really looking into sustainability traits like drought tolerance or pest resistance — they’re looking into herbicide resistance,″ said Eric Gall from the organic farmers' lobby IFOAM Organics Europe, referring to the risk that farmers would be locked into using the industry’s proprietary combinations of seeds and chemicals.

″For the moment, there is really not much development at all on abiotic stress,″ added Astrid Österreicher from the GMO watchdog group Testbiotech, referring to environmental factors like drought, temperature shifts and CO2 levels. ″Still, in the discourse, it’s put a lot: ‘Yeah, we can produce these varieties, it will be quicker than with conventional breeding.’ But it’s just not true. It’s just an empty promise.″

Big challenge

In fact, despite laxer regulation in other parts of the world, no company has been able to come up with a drought-tolerant — let alone drought-resistant — crop using gene-editing technologies. Farmers in Argentina are growing genetically altered wheat that’s able to withstand drier conditions, but the plant is a GMO, with parts of its DNA spliced from sunflowers.

Some scientists are also on a quest to identify forgotten drought-tolerant crops that farmers around the world had obtained across centuries using conventional breeding methods.

″That's one of the big challenges," said Ty Vaughn, who leads plant biotechnology research at Bayer. ″The thing about drought tolerance is that it's extremely complex. You need to understand the plant’s physiology in a lot of detail, there are a lot of genes that might be involved to achieve drought tolerance. And it's important to analyze and test how this works in different environments.″

This is why some skeptics question the technology's ability to deliver on its claims.

″Gene-editing techniques are certainly not as precise as they are portrayed to be; they do result in unintended side-effects,″ said Gall of IFOAM. ″That’s why we need to have a risk assessment and a traceability system. And this is what the current GMO framework provides, so I’d question why we should throw away 20 years of biosafety standards.″

Last week, the Commission suggested it would not deregulate gene-edited crops.

″We have to make sure the technology is safe. Somehow we have to get the balance right,″ Claire Bury, the EU official in charge of the regulatory proposal, told POLITICO's Future of Food and Farming Summit in Paris last week. ″What we’re looking for is a proportionate risk assessment for the NGTs, so that means we wouldn’t do away with it altogether. I know that in other jurisdictions they’ve been a little more radical, but our feeling is that it should be more proportionate.″

The decision is unlikely to make the industry overtly happy, but for what it’s worth, everyone from the biotech companies to environmental groups and farmers appears to agree on one thing: that gene-edited crops are not going to be a silver bullet against climate-induced extreme weather events like this summer’s drought.

″They need to be seen as just one of many tools in the farmer’s toolbox,″ said Rasoulpour of Corteva.