Brussels, Belgium
October 10, 2019

Euroseeds welcomes the citizens initiative of Wageningen University students who founded the Group “Grow Scientific Progress: crops matter!” and ask the European Union to change its GMO legislation in view of targeted mutagenesis breeding.

We share the conviction that plant breeding and crop improvement are crucial for all European citizens and key to improve the environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness of the EU’s high-quality agri-food production system.
The latest breeding methods are highly valuable tools for breeding more resilient crops, with less resources and in less time: a much-needed advancement in times of climate change and prospected food insecurity, as the initiative rightly states.

While Euroseeds also shares the objective to change the EU’s GMO Directive to free advanced mutagenesis breeding from the provisions for transgenic crops, we recommend a different legal approach by a targeted amendment that effectively excludes products of old and new mutagenesis breeding from its scope and adapts the respective annex accordingly.

By this, the EU’s policy and rules would be re-aligned with those already established or currently being developed in the rest of the world, creating legal certainty for EU operators and authorities.

What the Citizens’ Initiative “Grow scientific progress: crops matter!” says in a nutshell:

We want the EU to focus on sustainability, safety and responsible innovation when it comes to new plant breeding techniques. Let’s demand a better legal framework to reach these objectives by collecting one million signatures!

Why?
The current regulatory system results in an implicit ban of new plant breeding techniques. These new techniques are valuable tools for breeding more resilient crops, with less resources and in less time: a much-needed advancement in times of climate change and prospected food insecurity – and thus something we simply cannot afford to miss out on.

What?
Most importantly, we propose to focus on the crop rather than the technique. In this way safety is ensured while the valuable benefits of new techniques are not lost to illogical regulatory hurdles.

How?
Support us with your signature over the online signature collection system : www.growscientificprogress.org.

Who we are
We are a group of young Master’s students from eight EU member states, who met during our studies at Wageningen University and Research.

Website: http://www.euroseeds.org

Published: October 10, 2019