Abstract
How have national institutions and committees from EU member states positioned themselves regarding the use of gene editing in agriculture? To answer this question, this article examines and compares 11 official reports and position statements from 7 European countries: Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. The various kinds of issues that are addressed and arguments that are made in the reports are coded into large categories (innovation, risk, ethics, legislation, etc.) and are analyzed. The paper discusses the main similarities and differences in terms of how the governance of gene editing is problematized. In doing so, the paper aims to provide a useful resource to broaden debates on the future regulation of gene editing within and beyond Europe.
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Notes
We have searched for reports and statements from all 28 EU member states, with the exception of the UK as its future membership of the EU is uncertain. According to our search, in only 7 countries reports on gene editing have been published. This does not mean, however, that other EU member states have not reflected upon the issue: Eriksson (2018) has provided a detailed list with statements and opinions by EU actors that, beyond the countries we identified, also includes Finland.
We focus on these four themes for they are the ones to which most space is dedicated in the reports.
The 2018 French report is reflective about these terms, and even critical about the use of military metaphors.
In the 2019 German statement terms like economy/economic, market, industry/industrial, commercial do not appear. In the discussion paper from 2015, there is some discussion, but rather abstract, and in relation to GMOs.
If one takes a look, for example, at Germany’s agricultural policy arena, one can observe a proliferation of positions that are far from convergent: the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation “welcomes” the European Court of Justice ruling with reference to the precautionary principle, whereas the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety takes the opposite view; at the level of farmers' associations, the conventionally oriented “Deutscher Bauernverband” argues that “CRISPR/CAS-9 cannot be meaningfully regulated with the existing genetic engineering law”, whereas an umbrella organization of the German organic sector (BÖLW) supports the ruling.
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The authors would like to thank Madeleine Akrich, Brice Laurent and Maximilian Heimstädt for their feedback.
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Meyer, M., Heimstädt, C. The divergent governance of gene editing in agriculture: a comparison of institutional reports from seven EU member states. Plant Biotechnol Rep 13, 473–482 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11816-019-00578-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11816-019-00578-5