[T]he number of European patents in the field of plant biotechnology is proving to be largely insufficient compared to the world competition: China has filed 10,624, the United States 8,800, Japan 2,143, while Germany filed 1,530 and France 1,007, according to the World Property Organization. Our country suffers from administrative red tape.
We must be open to innovation and not elevate the precautionary principle to a principle of inaction. CRISPR, for example, is a major technological breakthrough that brings together all the qualities — more precise, easier to implement and inexpensive compared to other existing techniques.
Rather than facilitating its development and use, the European Court of Justice… ruled in July 2018 that it was necessary to apply the GMO regulation to organisms obtained by CRISPR. This was an old regulation 20 years ago, and today out of step with scientific progress.
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And for those who naively think that we can do without it, we must remember that agriculture could only develop by fighting against crop bioaggressors: insect pests, disease-causing agents, rodents and birds, etc. And for this, there are mechanical and physical means, genetic means (classical or faster varietal selection via biotechnologies including new genomic techniques with in particular CRISPR), biological control with antagonistic organisms (an insect that eats another insect or lays eggs that prevent its enemy from developing), agronomic techniques (rotations, staggering of sowing, etc.) with a whole set of technical itineraries that thewe call theagro-ecology, which must be practiced in a pragmatic way according to situations on the ground without being “ideologized.”
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Let us therefore hope that France will be able to learn from all its past mistakes to lead this presidency of the Council of the European Union. The future of European agriculture depends on it.
[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in French and has been translated and edited for clarity.]
