Viewpoint: Will new breeding techniques help make European agriculture more competitive?

“Breeding companies have been eagerly awaiting this for a long time,” begins Sjaak van der Ploeg, Breeding & Strategy Lead at the Dutch company Axia, which focuses on vegetable crop breeding, particularly tomatoes. “Many countries have more liberal legislation regarding this.”

“If the European seed breeding sector wants to remain competitive, we simply must keep up,” says Sjaak, referring to the sentiment around the likely upcoming relaxation of EU GMO legislation. That should, from 2028, allow the use of New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) under certain conditions.

Sjaak, though, tempers the high expectations of those techniques. “People think NGTs will accelerate breeding. And for the more general problems, like powdery mildew, which affects many different crops and where much is already known about the gene, that will certainly be the case.”

Related on the SLP

Fact vs misinformation: An official EU guide to GMOs and gene-edited foods Viewpoint: Europe clears the way for gene-edited crops — but fear-driven restrictions still slow their full potential

Ahead of the midterms, Meta has paid at least 29 anti-LGBTQ accounts for their posts

Viewpoint: RFK Jr.’s stacked FDA advisory council endorses multicancer screening test from ethically- questionable company that would increase false positives and waste billions of dollars

Viewpoint: The price Americans pay for science denialism

He believes it will be different for more complex problems involving multiple genes or for unknown traits, many of which have sequences and DNA that must still be mapped. “But NGTs will certainly help, even if, in 2028, they don’t immediately yield an abundance of crop characteristics. Plus, there are always still developments in conventional breeding,” Sjaak explains.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here