Euroseeds is supportive of the citizens' initiative of Wageningen University students who founded the Group “Grow Scientific Progress: crops matter!” and ask the European Union to change its GMO legislation in view of targeted mutagenesis breeding.
"We share the conviction that plant breeding and crop improvement are crucial for all European citizens and key to improve the environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness of the EU’s high-quality agri-food production system," Euroseeds says.
The latest breeding methods are highly valuable tools for breeding more resilient crops, with less resources and in less time: a much-needed advancement in times of climate change and prospected food insecurity, as the initiative rightly states.
While Euroseeds also shares the objective to change the EU’s GMO Directive to free advanced mutagenesis breeding from the provisions for transgenic crops, they recommend a different legal approach by a targeted amendment that effectively excludes products of old and new mutagenesis breeding from its scope and adapts the respective annex accordingly.
By this, the EU’s policy and rules would be re-aligned with those already established or currently being developed in the rest of the world, creating legal certainty for EU operators and authorities.
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