[action ended] Keep GMOs out of our fields and off our plates

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Tell the European Commission it must apply the EU’s GMO regulations to all GMOs, and stop trying to sneak GM food onto our fields and plates untested and unlabelled.

Big agricultural corporations want to use new genetic engineering techniques to force GM food onto our fields and dinner plates without us knowing. They claim these new techniques do not produce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and should be left out of our European GMO regulations.

But in reality, seeds produced with new GM techniques like CRISPR/Cas are fundamentally different from non-GM seeds. They are potentially unsafe for the environment and our health, and have no place in nature-friendly farming.

The EU’s highest court has ruled that the EU’s GMO regulations must be applied to organisms engineered with new GM techniques, for the sake of our environment and our health. Under EU regulations, GM organisms must undergo a strict safety evaluation, be labelled as GM, and be traceable throughout the supply chain.

Yet now the European Commission wants to change the law to exclude some GMOs from the EU’s GMO regulations.

This would mean that farmers, food producers, retailers and consumers can no longer reject GM products and opt for GM-free choices.

As a first step, the European Commission is asking people to comment on these plans. We have made it easy for you - just fill in the form and we will make sure your comment ends up on the desk of the European Commission.

Instead of weakening the EU’s GMO law, the European Commission must fix its weaknesses in the areas of risk assessment and labelling of GM food.

Martin Häusling (🇩🇪), Benoit Biteau (🇫🇷), Eleonora Evi (🇮🇹), Tilly Metz (🇱🇺), Michèle Rivasi (🇫🇷), Thomas Waitz (🇦🇹), Sarah Wiener (🇦🇹)
Members of the European Parliament for the Greens/EFA

Click here to read more about the consultation

The European Commission is holding a public consultation on its plan to introduce “legislation for plants produced by certain new genomic techniques”. The consultation closes on 22nd October 2021.

Under this plan, GM plants engineered with “targeted mutagenesis” (i.e. gene editing) and “cisgenesis” (i.e. gene transfer from a related organism that could be crossed with the organism being engineered) would no longer be regulated under the EU’s GMO legislation.

Seed producers claim that these plants aren’t GMOs because, in principle, their genetic makeup doesn’t carry any foreign DNA (i.e. genetic material from an unrelated species). The industry has called for “urgent action” to implement the European Commission’s plan.

However, the EU defines GMOs as an organism in which the “genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally”. And the European Court of Justice has warned that the exclusion of organisms obtained with gene editing techniques - including those that don’t have any foreign DNA intentionally added - from the EU’s GMO regulations would “compromise” their objective of avoiding adverse effects on human health and the environment and “fail to respect the precautionary principle”.

As the Greens/EFA, we are concerned the European Commission’s plan would weaken the EU’s environmental and food safety standards and undermine EU consumers’ right to know how our food has been produced.

Help us stop this plan by writing to the European Commission today!

[action ended] Keep GMOs out of our fields and off our plates

The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament

This action has ended, the consultation is closed.

The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament