In an opinion published on 21 March, the Belgian Superior Health Council (SHC) issued a favourable opinion on the proposal for a regulation on plants obtained using certain new genomic techniques (NGT).
This positive opinion comes at a time when the Council of the EU is still divided over how to regulate the use of these techniques (see EUROPE 13379/4).
On 6 March, experts from the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) were critical of the European Commission’s proposal (see EUROPE 13334/3) (https://aeur.eu/f/bme ). For the experts at ANSES, an unexpected change in the composition of the plant could lead to nutritional, allergenic or toxicity problems.
The Belgian SHC believes that ‘NGT plants’ have the potential to contribute to sustainable, climate-friendly agricultural production, “with higher yields requiring fewer resources”. It “welcomes” the proposed regulations for NGT plants and supports the architecture of the proposal, subdividing NGT plants into two categories.
A verification procedure would be used to distinguish between Category 1 and Category 2 NGTs. ‘NGT 1’ plants would be treated in the same way as traditional plants, according to the proposal.
For ‘NGT 2’ plants, the current proposal requires a detailed case-by-case risk assessment, similar to that for GMOs, in which agronomic, environmental, phenotypic, compositional, toxicological, allergenic and nutritional aspects are included, notes the SHC.
The future development of patent rules, as announced by the European Commission, “should avoid creating monopolies that make affordable and widespread access to these new techniques and plants more difficult”, says the organisation.
Link to the opinion of the Belgian SHC: https://aeur.eu/f/bmc (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)