Parliament is giving new genetic engineering processes a chance – after almost twenty years of standstill. Whether new plants will soon grow in our fields is decided more in Brussels than in Bern.
Parliament is daring to make a small change in genetic engineering. In the beginning there were the farmers.
Without discussion. This is how Parliament has decided on genetic engineering for almost twenty years. She was taboo, wasted word and wasted time. From this point of view, the world was upside down in the Council of States on Tuesday.
Without discussion, the small chamber agreed to a turnaround in genetic engineering. Now the Federal Council must prepare the approval of genome-edited plants. The National Council had already approved it. There, the Green critic of genetic engineering, Meret Schneider, spoke of a “radical change of opinion in Parliament”.
The FDP politician Christian Wasserfallen said it longer, but with the same content. It is the first time since the 2005 moratorium vote that Parliament has said on genetic engineering: “Yes, we want to go in a direction in which we use the new technologies.”
The turn of the peasants
At the origin of the parliamentary turn was a turn of the peasants. At the beginning of the year, the board of directors of the Swiss Farmers’ Association overturned its hitherto rigid rejection of any use of genetic engineering processes. The direct consequence of this was that the factions from the center and SVP took over the peasant position. They joined the FDP and Green Liberals, who had previously shown themselves to be open to new genetic engineering.
Agriculture is now aiming to exempt certain genetically modified plants from the Genetic Engineering Act. From a legal point of view, the plants would then no longer be “genetically modified organisms”. They also did not require a corresponding declaration.
This point is criticized by the Greens. A complete separation of the flow of goods and declaration are “the minimum that we owe the Swiss population in terms of transparency,” said National Councilor Meret Schneider in the debate. Your parliamentary group regards excluding the new procedures as “negligent”. But the debate in the European Union is going in the same direction.
The big question is here as there: Where does plant breeding end? Where does genetic engineering begin?
A question of precision
The background is that genetic engineering has made enormous progress in recent years. Certain plants that are modified with new instruments differ little or not at all from conventional breeds.
The Crispr/Cas9 gene scissors, for example, make it possible to insert or switch off DNA building blocks in the genome in a very targeted manner. It is a much finer instrument than classic genetic engineering. Much more precise than the so-called “random mutagenesis”, a method with which many of today’s crops were bred. For example, the durum wheat for the pasta.
In undirected mutagenesis, mutations in the genome are provoked by radioactive radiation or chemicals. Here, coincidence is in charge: One hopes that a desired plant trait will emerge. Undirected mutagenesis is permitted today, but much more precise gene editing is forbidden. This has been criticized by science for years.
The pressure of science
The academies lobbied massively for a new genetic engineering policy. Before the topic came to Parliament, more than seventy researchers had signed a public appeal. Numerous studies have concluded that genetically modified products are just as safe for consumption as conventional products, they wrote. Research is also putting pressure on in the European Union.
The German biologist and Nobel Prize winner Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard recently pleaded in the “FAZ” for the very regulation that is now being announced by the Swiss Parliament. The biologist argued that more than a hundred marketable genome-edited plants are known worldwide. As examples, she named wheat with less gluten, fungus-resistant wine varieties or drought-tolerant varieties of corn, soybeans or wheat.
Some of these plants are interesting for Switzerland. According to the plan that has now been approved by Parliament, they could be approved after 2024, provided they do not contain any foreign genetic material. The prerequisite is that the European Union also allows them.
What is the EU doing?
The EU Commission is currently dealing with the same issues as Bern. She described the new procedures in spring 2021 as a possible part of the Green Deal. The current GMO legislation is “not suitable for these innovative technologies,” the commission wrote. Since then, there has been a broad consultation on the new procedures in Europe. A positioning is expected for 2023.
A year later, the Federal Council will then have to deliver the draft that has now been ordered. Industry representatives and experts expect that Switzerland will take over the regulation of the EU.
“A deviating attitude will be difficult,” said the farmer’s president Markus Ritter recently in the NZZ. Roland Norer, a legal scholar at the University of Lucerne, has a similar assessment of the situation. “Different regulations make cross-border transactions more difficult,” he says. “Only the labeling as a GMO product would be inconsistent.”
Criticism from NGOs, organic farmers and Greens
The critical actors are the same in Europe as in Switzerland. They mainly include Greens, NGOs, smallholder organizations and organic farming. In an initial statement, the Bio Suisse association described Parliament’s approach as “genetic engineering through the back door”. Many representatives of the organic sector doubt that plants from new genetic engineering will meet the consumers’ wishes.
However, recent surveys indicate that the population is more open to the technology than previously thought. In a survey conducted by the research institute GfS Bern in autumn, those applications that generate a specific benefit, for example that farmers have to spray fewer pesticides, received the most approval.
A few months earlier, a study by ETH Zurich had come to similar conclusions. A new generation of consumers is growing up who is demonstrably more open to “innovative solutions in agriculture”, it was said in the explanation.