Pros and cons of gene-editing crops for food

The government is pushing ahead with legislation that may pave the way for gene-edited food to be grown and sold in England.

The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill seeks to modify UK regulation on genetically modified organisms and marks “a major departure from EU policy”, said FarmingUK.

Farming Minister Mark Spencer told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that Britain needed to “protect itself” by “using the technologies available to us” to safeguard food supplies as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues.

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The aim is to “develop crops that are more resilient to disease, climate change and other impacts, and less reliant on pesticides”, said Politico’s London Playbook.

But the prospect of gene-edited food on British supermarket shelves has proved controversial.

1. Pro: food security amid war

Food security has been a growing concern during the conflict in Ukraine. Russia’s blockades in the invaded country are preventing the export of produce including wheat, leading to rising food prices and global shortages.

Britain is “heavily reliant” on food imports, said The Telegraph, but the gene-editing bill would “remove unnecessary barriers inherited from the EU” and boost food production in the UK. Professor Gideon Henderson, a scientific adviser to the government, told The Guardian that gene-editing could “increase food security” for the UK.

2. Con: public acceptance

The public appetite for genome-edited food is dependent on “perceptions of risks and benefits”, said a January 2022 briefing for the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (Post).

Although the perception of risk is “often said to be lower for genome-editing than modification”, “polarised debates” on the issue may “increase public disquiet”, the briefing continued. Education was key, because “surveys and textual analyses” have found that consumers have a “low level of knowledge of genome-editing”.

3. Pro: resistance to disease

An estimated 20% to 40% of crop yield worldwide is lost to pests and diseases, according to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI).

But “precision technologies allow us to speed up the breeding of crops that have a natural resistance to diseases”, then environment secretary George Eustice told The Telegraph as the bill was unveiled in May.

4. Con: traceability for consumers

A survey last year by the Food Standards Agency found that most UK consumers wanted gene-edited products to be clearly identifiable in supermarkets. But the government is planning to allow these products to be sold without such labelling.

Conservative think-tank Bright Blue has called for greater transparency in labelling and said that consumers should not be “tricked”, The Times reported. The January parliamentary briefing called for an international public registry of all commercial agricultural biotechnology products, including genome editing.

5. Pro: greater nutrition

Gene-editing could be used to create more nutritious crops, such as vitamin D-enriched tomatoes. Earlier this year, scientists announced that they had created genetically edited tomatoes that each contained as much provitamin D3 – the precursor to vitamin D – as two eggs.

Guy Poppy, a professor of ecology at the University of Southampton, told FoodNavigator that “gene-editing tomatoes to accumulate provitamin D3 at levels above recommended dietary guidelines could result in better health for many”.

6. Con: animal suffering

Critics claim the government bill is likely to pave the way for similar changes for livestock gene-editing. Although such changes would be dependent on a regulatory system to safeguard animal welfare, campaigners have warned that livestock gene-editing could reinforce the use of factory farming.

Kierra Box, of Friends of the Earth, told The Guardian that gene-editing was “genetic modification by a different name”. The technique “still focuses on altering the genetic code of plants and animals to deal with the problems caused by poor soils, the over-use of pesticides and intensive farming”, she said.