Poland breaks opposition to EU NGT deregulation

Last year, the EU Council of Agriculture Ministers had twice rejected the simplification of the long-awaited EU GMO legislation proposed by the EU Commission in July 2023. More than 55% of EU member states had voted in favour of making it easier to approve plants that have been specifically mutagenised using new genomic techniques than transgenic breeds or those in which larger gene segments of their own genome have been genetically modified. However, the majority did not represent the required 65% of the EU population. Populous Member States such as Germany and Belgium abstained, others such as Poland rejected the Commission draft. They had called for transparency for farmers and consumers and free access to seeds for farmers by means of seed and product labeling and a ban on the patenting of genetically modified plants.

After two failed attempts, Poland presented a compromise solution that provides for the labeling of patented or patent-pending seeds and a de facto obligation to license them to farmers. Producers only have to state whether they license their varieties. However, according to experts, no farmer will de facto plant a non-licensable variety. The Polish initiative met with broad approval at Attachee level in March. Only 22% of EU member states rejected the amended draft. At the weekend, the proposal has now received the necessary qualified majority in the Standing Committee of the 27 EU member states, although Belgium and Germany have called for improvements. Even if they vote against it, the qualified majority will still stand if the member states vote as they did in the last rejection in 2024.

This is because Poland, which represents 8.67% of the EU population, is now voting in favour. In purely mathematical terms, this means a wafer-thin majority in the EU Council of Agriculture Ministers. In the last vote in the EU Council of Agriculture Ministers, Spain’s proposal, which did not yet take Poland’s proposal into account, was adopted by 57.56% of the member states in favor of the NGT regulation. If Poland, which represents 8.37% of the EU population, now approves its own proposal, there will be a Council majority of 65.93% in terms of population share, even if Germany (18.8%) and Belgium (2.6%) reject the proposal.

According to Brussels circles, the Polish proposal will now enter the trilogue decision-making process with the European Parliament, the EU Commission and the EU Council at the end of April. There it will be further optimised. In the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the Member States to the EU (Coreper), only six EU states rejected the draft – including Austria and Hungary, while Germany and Bulgaria indicated that they would abstain. However, to consider all of the remaining 19 states as supporters is gross nonsense, as the previous voting behavior at attachee level shows. There, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Greece had spoken out against Poland’s proposal, while other critics of the NGT regulation, such as Austria, Hungary and Malta, had not. If these are included, the hitherto dominant opponents of genetic engineering have a calculated share of 13.59% of the population. This means that the resistance of the Member States to transgenic breeding appears to be much lower for cisgenic varieties. In NGT breeding, which accounts for around 90% of all genetic modifications at the R&D stage, only the genes themselves are switched on or off by modifying up to 20 gene building blocks (nucleotides).

Although the proportion of climate-adapted plants, which the proponents of NGT have always advertised, is well below 20% of all breeding worldwide, support for such breeding seems politically necessary.

The trilogue negotiations will nevertheless provide plenty of fuel for the fire. The old, much less right-wing populist EU parliament had called for not labeling of NGT1 plants as labelling was left out intentionally from the current and  the original draft regulation. The reason for this is the finding that NGT-1 breeds do not differ genetically in any way from conventional breeds produced by random mutagenesis – except, of course, that the mutations required for breeding are introduced in a more targeted manner than with random mutagenesis, for example using the CRISPR-Cas gene scissors. When it comes to coexistence with organically bred plants, critics of the draft regulation miss clear rules that allow farmers to agree on planting in neighbouring fields so that organic breeding has the attributes to be able to obtain the various organic labels.

Some of the right wing parties that have hugely gained seats in the European Parliament, however are more pro- than contra-NGT-1 breeds. The German right-wing AfD, for example, outlined in its programme that it aims to modernize the EU regulations to allow planting for NGTs and GMOs in Europe.