EU ministers set to exclude CRISPR crops from GMO legislation

Following a proposal from the Netherlands supported by Estonia, Denmark and Belgium, presented in Brussels, EU agriculture ministers seem decided to relax the EU GMO legislation concerning new breeding methods. Most ministers said that crops created by new breeding methods including editing of few oligonucleotides should no longer fall under the strict labeling and safety assessment rules that were established for transgenic crops, which contain DNA of foreign species. Stakeholders said, the move could only be implemented by the next EU Commission.

The turn of EU agriculture ministers follows an earlier decision of the Swiss Ständerat to relax labeling rules for crops that were created by means of targeted mutagenesis but are in fact not distinguishable from crops created by classical random mutagenesis. The Dutch proposal forsees to implement a standard adjustment to Directive EC 2001/18 on the deliberate release of GMOs into the environment. Last year, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that targeted mutagenesis products should also be considered as GMOs.

Researchers and breeders had sharply protested against the ECJ ruling that would significantly delay market uptake of crops created by targeted mutation, thus cutting funding for applied research projects in Europe.