PRESS RELEASE

The European Parliament’s favourable vote represents a twenty-five-year step backwards, eliminating risk assessment, traceability and labelling of genetically modified organisms produced with New Genomic Techniques (NGTs), and enabling the extension of patent rights to conventional plants. This constitutes a potential death blow to the precautionary principle which, by opening the door to patented GMO crops in the environment, lays the groundwork for further concentration of the seed market in the hands of a few agrochemical multinationals.

17 June 2026 – Twenty Italian organisations (list below) defending peasant, organic and biodynamic agriculture, as well as the rights of consumers and citizens, deem the European Parliament’s final vote on the proposed Regulation on GMO plants produced with New Genomic Techniques (NGTs, rebranded in Italy as TEA – Assisted Evolution Techniques) to be extremely serious. The regulation has also been stubbornly backed by major European and national agricultural associations, against the interests of farmers. This measure forms part of a broader deregulation agenda promoted by European institutions under the false belief that it will improve competitiveness.

The Regulation will result in a complete deregulation of new GMOs: it provides for the removal of risk assessment, traceability, identification and detection methods, liability rules and measures to prevent contamination, as well as product labelling for consumers. Moreover, EU Member States will not be able to exercise the opt-out, that is, the option to ban cultivation on their own territory, currently applied by two-thirds of Member States and by some regions. These core provisions of Directive 2001/18 on GMOs will no longer apply to NGTs, which will be able to circulate freely on the market and in the environment, without transparency and without pre- and post-market monitoring.

NGTs will still be considered GMOs only when it comes to intellectual property law. They are in fact all covered by patents held by a handful of large multinationals in the seed sector, such as Corteva, Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, KWS, Limagrain and BASF. With no obligation to make detection methods public, farmers and small and medium-sized seed companies will be left defenceless in cases of contamination caused by the cultivation of GMO/NGT crops in neighbouring fields. These patents cover genes similar to those already present in non-GMO seeds and will therefore allow multinationals to privatise traditional seeds as well, in line with Articles 8 and 9 of EU Directive 98/44, which the amendments rejected by MEPs would have changed for the better.

Companies will now be able to take farmers and small seed producers to court for patent infringement if their varieties contain patented genetic traits. The burden of proof will fall on those who suffer contamination through the spread of these genetic traits from neighbouring GMO/NGT fields, or on those who have simply developed the same traits through cross-breeding and natural selection. For small seed enterprises, which form the backbone of European breeding, this will mean having to carry out extremely costly, lengthy and impractical searches in patent databases to find out whether they are using seeds that contain a genetic trait privatised by some company. Most say they do not have the capacity or the resources to sustain such an effort, putting them at risk of being pushed out of the market or taken over by the very same large transnational agrochemical corporations that are seeking monopoly control.

“Faced with this serious regulatory rollback,” the organisations declare, “we appeal to citizens, peasant organisations, local authorities, social movements and national and regional institutions to use every available tool to counter and limit the effects of deregulation, to oppose the concentration of power in the hands of seed multinationals, and to safeguard the food sovereignty of our territories by defending biodiversity, farmers’ rights to seeds, and the right to produce and consume GMO-free food.”

ARCI, Assobio, Associazione Italiana per l’Agricoltura Biodinamica, Associazione Rurale Italiana, Centro Internazionale Crocevia, Demeter Italia, Fairwatch, Federazione Nazionale Pro Natura, Federbio, FIRAB, Fondazione Seminare il Futuro, Greenpeace Italia, Legambiente, Lipu, Movimento Consumatori, Navdanya International, Rete Semi Rurali, Slow Food Italia, Terra!, WWF Italia