This Monday, new food security and rural affairs minister told a packed room at the World Agritech Innovation Summit in London that his government had intentions to push ahead with the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) bill.
The bill, first introduced by the Tories last year, would enable agritech businesses to use precision breeding to develop crops that are more nutritious, resistant to pests and disease, resilient to climate change effects and more beneficial to the environment, Zeichner said.
This in turn would bolster the UK’s food production, reduce costs to farmers, and contribute to stronger food security in decades to come.
“It really has the potential to be a key technology for economic growth, food security and sustainability,” the Defra minister claimed.
The news was largely well received at the conference – but not by everyone.
“The announcement was welcomed because [Zeichner] wasn’t talking to a room full of farmers,” one senior farming figure at the event argued. “He was talking to a room full of tech companies who just want to sell their stuff to farmers.”
Farmers aren’t the only ones of that opinion. In response to the announcement, Leonie Nimmo, executive director at campaign group GM Freeze, said the ”intense pressure from the pro-biotech lobby [on Labour] seems to have been working, as the fantastic promises the government is making about the benefits of so-called precision-bred crops could have been cut and pasted straight from a biotech brochure”.
Transparency concerns
It goes to show that, while precision breeding does come with its benefits, as per Zeichner’s speech, it is still a touchy topic, amid concerns the technologies might not be regulated responsibly.
Groups including GM Freeze, Civil Society Alliance, and the Soil Association have called for strict labelling, traceability and environmental and health-related risk assessments in regards to precision-bred organisms. They want government to assure consumers and supply chains that these have full transparency and that they are making informed choices about the products they buy.
They have also warned about the associated risks of the new regulations, including fears that all British agricultural producers could suffer losses as a result of trade barriers.
But with the EU moving in a similar direction when it comes to gene edited plants, and countries like the US and China having a much more lax regulatory landscape, this might not be such a big issue.
Read more: Can UN food security roadmap feed nine billion people sustainably?
There is also an argument that this type of technology will bring much-needed investment into the UK. As Zeichner pointed out at the conference, agriculture-related gene editing startups have raised over $2.7bn since 2012, globally – but only 5% of venture capital investment has gone to Europe-based companies, versus 80% to US-based companies. The Defra minister made sure to remind those present of the Labour’s party international investment summit on 14 October, where the government will make clear to investors from all over the world that Britain is open for business.
But Soil Association CEO Helen Browning warns against selling gene editing as a “silver bullet” to a wider issue – that of unsustainable food production and subsequent biodiversity decline. Indeed, it should be part of an array of solutions looking at the global food and farming industry from a holistic perspective, she says.
Food security is a complex concept, and its success relies on more than making a few tomato breeds more drought resistant – especially for a country like the UK, which imports around half of its food, much of which comes from countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change.
That is not to say the current government is not aware of that, and the appointment of a food security minister is already a step forward in acknowledging the challenge ahead.
But with the global population expected to reach nine billion by 2050, it is the systemic problems at the root of food production – from major levels of greenhouse emissions to water pollution and usage, mass deforestation and soil health degradation – that truly need to be addressed.
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