science on the trail of “new GMOs”, more resistant and adapted to climate change

The objective of these new genetic manipulation techniques, more “natural” than for traditional GMOs, is to adapt crops to climate change and diseases.

While farmers are currently demonstrating, particularly against taxes and environmental standards, another debate is currently playing out at the European level. This debate concerns what some call “the new GMOs” and involves farmers, food manufacturers and environmental associations.

These “new GMOs” are in fact new genome editing techniques that have emerged in recent years. To understand how they work, head to Avignon: in the laboratories of the Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae), and more precisely in a culture chamber. “We have tomato plants and we are in a testing phase to verify the effective resistance of these plants to viruses, but also the durabilityexplains Jean-Luc Gallois, research director, specialist in genome editing. Do these plants remain resistant or is there, little by little, erosion?

As with GMOs, one of the objectives of these new techniques is to make plants more resistant, but also to make them compatible with the climate of the 21st century. “We are going to work a lot on resistance to pathogens which should make it possible to limit the use of pesticidesexplains Jean-Luc Gallois. We will work on resistance to heat and drought. It is these characteristics that are targeted, more than productivity characteristics.” But these techniques are at the proof of concept stage. Researchers therefore still have work to prove their effectiveness.

The European Commission wants to relax regulations

GMOs are based on what is called transgenesis, that is to say, a piece of DNA from another species is introduced into an organism. New techniques, on the other hand, make it possible to modify the genome of a fruit or vegetable without external input, thanks in particular to the “molecular scissors” Crispr-cas 9, an innovation which earned the 2020 Nobel Prize for Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Carpenter and American Jennifer Doudna. “Where we have had a lot of evolution in recent years is that originally, we could cut a piece of DNA which repaired itselfdevelops Jean-Luc Gallois. But now, we will be able to very precisely target a base of this DNA and change it in a specific way. We will be able to even more closely copy evolutionary mechanisms that can occur in the open field, for example.” More flexible, safer, faster: here in summary are the arguments of the supporters of these new techniques.

Today, legally, these plants are considered GMOs. But the European Commission wants to ease the constraints by creating two categories of plants. The first would bring together those which have undergone the fewest mutations, which would then be considered conventional plants.

This is going in the right direction, according to Laurent Guerreiro, member of the board of directors of the Union française des semenciers (UFS): “For us, it is an essential tool because we are faced with an equation which is becoming almost insolvable today: we must continue to produce with a level of constraints, whether regulatory, environmental or climatic, which is always growing.”

“If you can no longer use a fungicide to prevent a fungus from attacking the wheat and making it unfit for consumption, then you need to improve the level of natural resistance of that plant so that it can fight against the disease.”

Laurent Guerreiro, from the French Seed Manufacturers Union

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This new regulation was validated on Wednesday January 24 by the Environment Commission of the European Parliament. It will be debated in a plenary session in Strasbourg at the beginning of February.

“Hidden GMOs”?

But according to certain NGOs, the threat to biodiversity is real. Greenpeace, the Peasant Confederation and Friends of the Earth denounce a flouted precautionary principle, a lack of scientific perspective. They talk about hidden GMOs. And for Françoise Cazals, from France Nature Environnement, their effectiveness remains to be proven. “In fact, we feel like we have gone back 30 years when biotechnology multinationals promised that GMOs would solve the problem of world hunger, or that a banana vaccine or rice enriched with carotene, she recalls. However, the cultivation of these GMOs has suffered some disappointments, well documented by numerous scientific studies which note ultimately disappointing yields and on the other hand, phenomena of resistance to herbicides or insecticides. Hence an increased and diversified use of pesticides which are sold, incidentally, by GMO producers.”

Other organizations, such as the French Health Security Agency (ANSES), cite a lack of clarity in the Commission’s text. The Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese) points out that there are no studies evaluating this type of genetic modification in the long term.