With backing from Labour, precision bred crops could be on their way to UK farms. But the complex issue divides both the industry and the public
Imagine a future where a special type of barley reduces the methane emissions from cows, where wheat with a bigger grain size produces more food from less land and where low-carbon legumes are bred to be resistant to pests.
That future is edging ever closer in England. Following decades of policy inertia, momentum is again building behind genetic crop engineering and its role in achieving future food security.
One of the Conservative government’s final acts was to begin the process of creating a lighter-touch regulatory regime for precision breeding technologies, which tweak the DNA of plants or animals in a precise way to select for desirable traits.
This week, Labour confirmed it would bring forward the secondary legislation needed to make this regime a reality as soon as parliamentary time allows.
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“This government recognises that food security is national security. That is why today we are introducing legislation to unlock precision breeding to boost Britain’s food security, support nature’s recovery and protect farmers from climate shocks,” said farming minister Daniel Zeichner.
As the world enters a new era of extreme weather conditions and supply chain instability, proponents of precision breeding believe the ability to grow drought- or disease-resistant crops can help protect British food producers against the threat from climate change. When the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act (see box, p42) was passed into law in 2023, it was heralded by then food minister Mark Spencer as “fantastic news” for British consumers and farmers.
So, is genetic engineering a silver bullet for climate-resilient agriculture or an unproven technology falsely promising a quick fix? What progress has been made in recent years? And can it become mainstream?
First of all, any developments on this front will be gradual, rather than fast-paced. Even once secondary legislation is forthcoming, gene-edited products aren’t expected to appear on UK shelves for several years, since new crop varieties have to be trialled and then tested for commercial and consumer acceptability.
That acceptability cannot be taken for granted. Those on the side of precision-bred organisms (PBOs) are keen to differentiate them from genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which were subject to a public backlash in the UK in the 1990s. The former introduces traits that could have occurred naturally or through traditional breeding, while the latter involves inserting foreign DNA into an organism’s genome.
However, campaigners against genetic modification put both under the same umbrella. Leonie Nimmo, executive director at campaign group GM Freeze, describes precision breeding as “more of a political construct than it is a scientific definition”, which “allows the deregulation of a swathe of organisms that have been genetically modified in the lab”.
That opposition also came through in an FSA consultation, which gathered the views of 412 stakeholders – including consumers, farmers, NGOs, academics and retailers – between November 2023 and January 2024. While 18% of respondents supported the intentions of the Precision Breeding Act, 81% did not.
Breaking down the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act
Frustrated by stringent EU regulation of genetic engineering and worried at ceding advantage to other countries, the previous UK government charted a new path:
● Previously, all genetically engineered plants and animals were regulated as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). However, the Act creates a new category: precision-bred organisms (PBOs), which could have been created using traditional breeding methods, albeit over a much longer period.
● Precision breeding is distinct from genetic modification, whereby genes from one species are inserted into another in a way not possible via traditional breeding methods. The distinction has been contested, but the Act received Royal Assent in 2023.
● Labour has said it will bring forward the secondary legislation required to create a new regulatory framework for PBOs in England. The FSA has already drawn up proposals for a two-tiered approach: one for where the potential safety risks are understood and not of concern; and the other for where safety risks may require more detailed scrutiny of PBOs.
Earlier research by the FSA suggested greater support among the general public, though there was still a divide. In a 2023 survey of 2,057 people conducted by YouGov, 49% said they would be open to the use the precision breeding of plants in food production.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, support for the tech is stronger in the farming sector, which has been hard hit by the impact of climate change.
The NFU describes the Precision Breeding Act as a “significant step forward”, and wants Labour to pass the legislation as soon as possible. “Without legal certainty through fit-for-purpose regulations, the potential benefits of biotechnology like gene editing for British farming, environment and society will be left on the shelf,” says NFU vice president Rachel Hallos.
Until that legislation happens, businesses cannot put forward applications for precision-bred products.
Still, work is going on behind the scenes. The former Conservative government enabled the UK’s first field trials of gene-edited crops on conventional farms, through a statutory instrument laid during the last parliament.
Fuelled by £2.2m in Defra funding, a coalition of farmers, scientists and food businesses known as PROBITY (Platform to Rate Organisms Bred for Improved Traits and Yield) has come together to trial the production and processing of precision-bred crops.
“Without legal certainty, the potential benefits of biotechnology will be left on the shelf”
Rachel Hallos, NFU
The first wave of trials will involve producing wheat with superior baking, toasting and processing properties; barley making high-lipid, high-energy forage aimed at lowering livestock methane emissions; and wheat with a bigger grain size, promising a step change in productivity.
“This is an incredibly important project for farming and food production in this country,” says Tom Allen-Stevens, an Oxfordshire farmer and founder of the British On-Farm Innovation Network, which is leading the PROBITY project. “We need to produce more food, that’s also nutritious, with fewer resources and less impact on the environment. Scientists have been developing new crop varieties that could help us rise to that challenge.”
Legumes are also the target of a consortium of four UK research organisations led by the John Innes Centre, which won £3m in Defra funding to enable the development of climate-resilient crops.
The research will address threats from pests and diseases, such as root rot in pea and bruchid beetle in fava bean, and will also target nutritional traits such as protein content, minerals and flavour components.
Dr Donal O’Sullivan, a collaborator on the project from the University of Reading, says the new research phase “comes at a critical juncture where we need to address the twin challenges of meeting growing demand for sustainably produced plant protein and at the same time mitigating the negative impacts of climate change”.
Some crops are being explicitly bred to cope with a changing climate. Bioceres Crop Solutions in Argentina, for example, has developed the first transgenic drought-resistant variant of wheat.
Natural alternatives
Yet sceptics believe it is possible to feed populations throughout climate challenges without the need for precision breeding technology.
Legumes, for example, are naturally hardy crops. The likes of peas, beans and lentils are considered a climate superfood due to their ability to fix nitrogen from the air in the soil, meaning they can be grown without the need for chemical fertilisers.
This makes them a popular tool in the kit of agroecological or regenerative farmers, who use techniques such as cover cropping, crop rotation and companion planting to harness the power of natural systems.
Biotech sceptics believe methods such as these should be the priority over precision breeding. “I think it’s really disingenuous to claim we can solve climate change by twiddling with genes,” says Nimmo of GM Freeze. “What we need is healthy soils, unpolluted water, seeds that people can afford to buy and exchange, and farmers to have sustainable livelihoods so they can make long-term investments in the environmental health of their land.”
That point is echoed by Sarah Hathaway, head of technical at the Soil Association. “From what we’ve seen, there’s no gene-edited product on the horizon that’s delivering anything for climate resilience,” she says. “Traditionally bred varieties already exist that are resistant to drought or pests and diseases.
“We believe the focus should be on solutions with more impact, such as focusing on building soil health and biodiversity in farming systems,” she adds.
Not that it has to be a binary choice between genetic engineering and regenerative agriculture. “One may help the other; they’re certainly not mutually exclusive,” says Professor Nigel Halford, a scientist from Rothamsted Research, which has developed two of the crops being used in the PROBITY trials.
As an example, Halford notes how disease-resistant crops have already enabled farmers worldwide to reduce dependence on artificial inputs like pesticides.
Some businesses already practising regenerative techniques are open-minded about how precision breeding can potentially support nature-based approaches. Dairy co-operative First Milk is one of the businesses supporting the PROBITY trials and also pays farmers a premium for adopting regenerative techniques. “We believe new technologies will be required to enable us to meet net zero and we support a range of R&D projects guided by that principle,” says First Milk communications director Nick Hindle.
Trade trouble?
The fact the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act only applies to England has created major potential problems for trade:
● The Conservative government’s position was that PBOs placed on the market in England would be saleable in Scotland and Wales. However, the Scottish government wants to set its own rules, while Wales has expressed concern over a lack of traceability and labelling required within the Act.
● Should current proposals go ahead, there’s potential for a perverse situation where an English trader could sell precision-bred wheat to a company in Scotland legitimately, but once the wheat is processed into bread it would fall under Scottish regulation of GMOs and be non-compliant.
● EU trade is similarly challenging. Although the EU has also proposed a more permissive regime for gene editing, it has adopted a different definition, ‘New Genomic Techniques’ (NGTs), as well as more stringent labelling and traceability requirements than the UK.
● This means businesses looking to export to the continent would need to ensure PBOs used in products are covered by the EU definition and would also be required to label them.
Retailer stance
Ultimately, though, the power lies with the big retailers, who will determine whether gene-edited products arrive on the shelves. So far, they’re sitting on the fence.
“There are merits in further exploring the use of genetically engineered food,” says Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the BRC. “However, any policy has to be developed in the context of consumer acceptability and the wider financial implications for our UK farmer suppliers.”
Their wariness to jump into precision breeding is understandable. After all, supermarkets felt the brunt of the backlash against the first wave of GM foods in the 1990s. As one retail source says: “Frankenfood headlines of decades ago stick in memories.” Retailers are also led by their customers, “who are not screaming: ‘Why can’t I get my GM flour?’”, the source adds.
They will also have to navigate the practicalities of stocking such products. A 2022 YouGov poll commissioned by campaign group Beyond GM found that 79% of people thought precision-bred crops, animals and other foods should be clearly labelled on packaging.
The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act has no such provision for labelling, meaning consumers would not know if they were eating foods produced from gene-edited crops or animals unless they were voluntarily labelled by businesses.
This lack of transparency has caused particular concern within the organic sector. Producers are worried it undermines their legal responsibility to exclude any genetically engineered organisms from their supply chains. “At the very minimum, we think there should be traceability and identification all the way through a supply chain, ideally with labelling,” says Hathaway.
“There are mechanisms to do that already within food supply chains, and it seems madness that in an age when transparency and provenance is more and more important, both for retailers and consumers, that the new Act seems to go against that.”
There is also the question of how far the legislation should go. In the FSA’s 2023 survey, just 28% of respondents said they would be happy for precision breeding to apply to animals.
For proponents of gene editing, too much dithering is a worry. “We’re a generation behind on GM and we’re falling behind on gene editing as well,” says Halford.
But when it comes to such an emotional and complex issue, it’s unlikely anyone will be rushing to get products on shelves for now.
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