Source: United Kingdom – Science Media Centre
Scientists comment on reports of an EU ‘reset’ which could mean the precision breeding act is dropped from UK legislation.
Dr Penny Hundleby, Senior Scientist at the John Innes Centre, said:
“As a scientist with over thirty years in genetic technologies, I’ve seen how innovation can transform agriculture. The UK now has a rare opportunity to lead globally in precision breeding — with the legislation passed and the science ready.
“To delay this progress in order to align with slower EU processes would undermine our ability to deliver resilient, sustainable crops at a time when food security and climate resilience are more urgent than ever. We risk forfeiting a clear post-Brexit advantage grounded in science, safety, and evidence.”
Prof Huw Jones, Chair in Translational Genomics for Plant Breeding, Aberystwyth University, said:
“Closer ties with the EU are a good thing but let’s not lose the logical regulatory progress we have made this side of the Channel. Simple gene editing is a speedier and more reliable breeding method to develop the crops we need in a changing world. It’s illogical to regulate these crops as GMOs and it is the EU that has been slow to follow the broad consensus on this. If there are no foreign genes, and the changes could have been generated by conventional breeding, they need regulation – but not as GMOs.”
Prof Neil Hall, Director of the Earlham Institute, said:
“Given the pressures on global food security, driven by climate change, the growing population and new diseases, it’s important that we harness all of the technical innovations at our disposal to ensure the sustainability of our agricultural systems.
“Over the past three years, including these last few months, Parliament has demonstrated important and legitimate leadership by passing the primary and secondary legislation to enable precision breeding in plants. It’s time to enable science research to help farmers adapt to our changing world.”
Prof Jonathan Jones FRS, Group Leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory, said:
“The Precision Breeding Act (PBA) provides an opportunity to protect our crops from pests and disease with biology rather than chemistry, and also enables new routes to more nutritious food, and I applaud this government and its predecessor for taking the legislation through to final approval and implementation. It is to my mind the sole Brexit dividend.
“However, it takes a long time between producing an improved plant in a lab and creating and obtaining approval for a variety that farmers can plant. I think it’s highly likely that by the time any precision bred varieties in the UK are ready to plant (likely at least 5 years from now) the EU will have approved its own version of the PBA.
“So, the government should stick to its guns on the PBA but quietly point out to the EU that, although there are no scientifically credible safety concerns with using these methods, the timelines in this industry are such that it will be a long time before any products are authorized in the UK and thus before any potential problems might arise.”
Prof Sarah Gurr, Chair in Food Security at Exeter University, said:
“It is sad to realise that whilst we embraced the need for GM vaccines during the recent COVID epidemic and we seem reticent to embrace gene edited crops. The need for climate proofed and disease resilient gene edited crops is paramount in our quest for sustainable agriculture.”
https://www.thetimes.com/article/08fe3606-e6ab-4a66-bb31-017165028f08
Declared interests
Jonathan Jones “is a senior investigator at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, and uses molecular and genetic approaches to study disease resistance in plants. Jones co-founded Norfolk Plant Sciences in 2007 with Prof Cathie Martin of JIC, with the goal of bringing flavonoid-enriched tomatoes to market (www.norfolkplantsciences.com). Jones is on the board of www.isaaa.org, the science advisory board of the 2Blades foundation (www.2blades.org) and the board of NIAB Cambridge University Farm. Jones has isolated and is deploying new resistance genes against potato late blight from wild relatives of potato, and conducting field trials to evaluate how well they work to protect the crop in the field and to generate improved varieties of potato (see http://www.tsl.ac.uk/news/blight-resistant-maris-piper/). See also http://www.tsl.ac.uk/groups/jones-group/.”
Penny Hundleby “is part of the Crop Transformation Group at the John Innes Centre and using genetic technologies to better understand the role of plant genes. The group provides gene editing resources to the UK and international research community and have been working with gene editing technologies in crops since 2014.”
Huw Jones: “I am speaking as a researcher at Aberystwyth University and not representing other organisations that I am affiliated with. I am a member of the FSA ACNFP and Defra ACRE. My declarations of interest are listed on the websites of those Depts.”
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