On a late spring day in 2024, 200 genetically modified (GM) rice plants left the clinical confines of a Milan university lab and, for the first time in nearly two decades, were planted in an Italian field.
Present on that farm that day in Mezzana Bigli, a small town in the northern province of Pavia, was an enthusiastic group of plant scientists, politicians and representatives of Italy’s powerful farming sector. They were there to mark a turning point in the country’s agricultural policy that, until then, made this kind of use of GM plants impossible.
“It was like a big party,” Vittoria Brambilla, an associate professor of botany at the University of Milan and lead researcher of the GM project, called Ris8imo (risottimo), told The Parliament.
She recalled retired colleagues in attendance who were "really happy to come celebrate this new wave that we were seeing in Italy.”
Many of them had had their work destroyed over the years by anti-GMO activists. The same fate would await Ris8imo, which was testing whether a new genetic modification tool, Crispr-Cas, could make the plant resistant to a fungal disease, called rice blast, in real-world conditions.
Crop science for Green Deal goals
What’s happening in those pilot fields in Italy comes amid a broader debate about loosening European Union GMO rules. The rise of a new generation of gene editing tools, such as Crispr-Cas, has fueled a renewed effort among crop scientists and agri-business to soften public and political resistance to GMOs across the bloc.
That resistance may be no fiercer than in Italy, given its proud culinary traditions and long-held opposition to foreign fast-food chains like Starbucks and Domino’s Pizza.
In 2023, the European Commission presented a proposal to overhaul GMO rules, including a novel taxonomy: GMOs were out. New genomic techniques (NGTs) were in.
NGT proponents say the updated jargon better reflects the minimal differences between gene-edited plants and their conventional counterparts. They also argue the new technology can help the EU deliver on sustainability goals, making plants higher-yielding or disease-resistant, reducing the need for harmful pesticides and fertilisers — a key goal of the EU’s Green Deal.
Environmental watchdogs have criticised the Commission’s proposal, arguing it would allow the agrichemical industry to sell genetically modified products with virtually none of the current regulatory oversight, which include safety checks, package labelling and monitoring throughout the supply chain.
Plant researchers add the benefits of gene editing would be short-lived.
“Basic evolutionary theory tells me that pathogens would adapt very, very fast,” Katja Tielbörger, a professor of plant ecology at Germany’s University of Tübingen, told The Parliament.
Brambilla acknowledges these potential shortcomings, saying the Ris8imo plants she helped develop would eventually succumb to new disease within a few years, requiring the “need to produce other plants.”
Turning to genetics as a defense against agricultural threats such as disease and climate change is like “designing a car today without considering that tomorrow's [roads] may be entirely different,” Stefano Bocchi, a professor of agronomy at the University of Milan, told The Parliament.
As genetically altered crops take the place of conventional variants, the risk to biodiversity increases, and it is precisely the “arsenal of diversity,” he said, that can protect farmers and their yields.
From ‘no’ to ‘yes’ on GMOs
The Ris8imo trials, set to resume this year, were made possible through an emergency decree by the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to combat drought. It also lifted restrictions on open-field GM experiments.
Small farmers and civil society groups contested the measure, calling it a “Trojan Horse” that would put GM foods on Italians’ tables without a suitable risk assessment or consumer labeling. The Associazione Rurale Italiana (ARI), which represents small-scale and family farmers across the country, said the decree “recklessly” undermined Italy’s reputation as a non-GM producer.
Accusing the government of skipping public consultation, Antonio Onorati, an ARI spokesperson, called the process a “very anti-democratic way to proceed.”
When farmers in the US and, to a lesser degree, Europe, began planting GMOs in the early aughts, thousands of Italian municipalities declared themselves GMO-free, due in part to strong campaigning by anti-GMO groups.
Yet with climate change putting plants at higher risk of disease, drought, bugs and heat, Italy has started to soften on GMOs, especially as global agricultural competitors threaten to gain an edge by embracing them.
Aside from the urgency of the climate crisis, an industry campaign spearheaded by Italy’s Association of Agricultural Genetics (SIGA) has helped change hearts and minds over GMOs — especially within Italy’s powerful farming establishment. SIGA’s president, Silvio Salvi, said his organisation was determined to avoid the communication mistakes the sector made when GMOs were widely introduced in the early aughts.
“We try to assist the evolution of the plant, because we want to drive this evolution in a direction that is useful for humanity,” he told The Parliament.
To support its efforts, SIGA hired a science journalist and communicator, Giovanni Carrada, who came up with a rebrand for the controversial genetic modification process: TEAs — the Italian-language equivalent to the NGTs introduced at EU level.
The difference between the new and old terms for genetic tinkering is how an organisms’ genes are altered. Earlier GMO techniques went through a process called transgenesis, when genetic material from one species is inserted into the DNA of an unrelated species.
NGT tools, such as Crispr-Cas, can modify DNA in other ways. These include deactivating, re-activating or duplicating a gene, choosing the exact location of an edit, or rearranging an entire DNA sequence. That allows proponents to say the genetic differences are minimal compared to those that occur naturally or in conventional breeding.
Calling them TEAs for Italian public consumption helped “give a good story, good marketing, so that they can accept [TEAs],” Massimiliano Barretta, a SIGA member who participated in the rebranding campaign, told The Parliament.
The NGT rebrand made its debut in Italy in September 2021, when SIGA and Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farming union, released a publication about it in a popular farming weekly. They sold NGTs as mimicking the outcomes of “natural biological evolution” as well as being cheaper than other GM tools.
Until then, Coldiretti had sided with small-time farmers and critics such as ARI or Crocevia, another representative of small-scale and artisanal farmers. Francesco Panié, a Crocevia campaigner, said Coldiretti’s “about-face” was key to the success of NGTs in Italy.
Also backing the campaign: Bayer Italia, the Italian arm of the German pharma and agrochemical giant, and one of a handful of multinationals lobbying for softer GMO rules at the EU level.
Neither Bayer Italia nor Coldiretti responded to requests for comment. SIGA’s Salvi said Bayer Italia was simply the biggest bidder among potential sponsors for SIGA’s campaign.
Food as intellectual property
The NGT’s assisted evolution argument is “highly questionable,” Franziska Köller, a molecular biologist in Germany who studies the environmental impact of genetic engineering, told The Parliament.
In addition to a lack of scientific consensus on just how close NGTs are to their conventional counterparts, there is also a lack of political consensus on the way forward for genetic engineering rules.
Seven EU capitals, mostly in central and eastern Europe, have insisted on maintaining mandatory labeling, tracing and safety checks. More biotech-friendly member states, such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain have nonetheless been able to nudge negotiations forward.
A sticking point remains how to protect small producers from big ones using NGT crops as intellectual property. The privatisation of food and genetic resources is already happening. Multinational agrichemical companies have used patented GM techniques to patent otherwise generic foods.
So far, efforts by big companies to assuage smaller ones and regulators, by setting up patent-licensing schemes, have fallen largely on deaf ears.
Ecology researchers say the political wrangling misses the point. If food security and long-term sustainability is the goal, policymakers need to think bigger – and more holistically.
“If NGTs are applied within the current system, there will be no benefit,” Tübingen’s Tielbörger said. “The one thing that promotes and stabilises yield, makes farms resilient and brings social benefits for farmers is biodiversity. My fear is amid this intensive discussion about NGTs, we're completely forgetting these solutions.”
A version of this story appeared first in the Italian-language magazine, Radar.
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