In an article published his week in PLOS Biology, Ottoline Leyser argues that the GM debate is distracting us from addressing the real challenges facing modern agriculture: global food security and environmental sustainability.
Leyser starts by discussing how GM is considered by many to be the epitome of all that’s bad in modern agriculture: the dominance of profit-driven multinational corporations, high-intensity monoculture farming and the accompanying use of large quantities of environmentally-damaging chemicals. As a plant scientist and nature-lover, I am also concerned about these farming practises. However, as Leyser points out, they have nothing to do with GM technology. It is a situation that was reached long before GM-crops were first grown commercially and is prevalent all over the world, including in the EU, where GM-crops have never been widely grown.
When deciding whether to grow a new crop variety, it is the trait, not the technology used to produce the trait that is more important. Unfortunately, EU law regulates crop varieties by technology, not trait. So, while new GM crops have to pass through rigorous testing and trials before they can be grown commercially, conventionally-bred crop varieties with similar traits can be grown without much regulation or consideration to their impact on the environment.
Regardless of whether we grow GM crops or not, regulation of new crop varieties by trait could provide much better protection to the environment than the EU’s current framework. Since both sides of the GM debate want to make agriculture more environmentally friendly and sustainable, maybe it is something we could all agree on.
Read the full, original article: The GM debate is distracting us from the real issues in agriculture
