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Inf’OGM interviewed Stéphane Galais, a farmer in Ille-et-Vilaine (Brittany, France) with a 25-hectare farm producing milk and cheese. He is also national secretary of the Confédération paysanne. In this interview, he explains and analyses what agritech means to him.

A few months ago, Living Carbon, a US start-up, announced that it had developed and planted genetically modified poplar trees in 2023. These trees are said to absorb more quickly carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases whose current accumulation in the atmosphere and oceans is causing problems for the Earth’s climate. As part of this program, Living Carbon is acquiring carbon credits to finance its work. The aim is to reduce the photorespiration of poplar and pine plants. What is photorespiration? What would be the ecological repercussions of this modification of photosynthesis?

Behind its label as an agricultural cooperative from Auvergne, Limagrain is now a global player in GMOs. The Group has been promoting GMOs for many years. Last March, its CEO, Sébastien Chauffaut, was optimistic about the forthcoming deregulation of GMOs/NGTs, which he hopes to market from 2029. Here’s a look at Limagrain’s GMO strategy, combining state privilege and lobbying.

In 2025, the European Union is expected to adopt a “biotech act” aimed, among other things, at modernising agriculture through new technologies. At the same time, public policies, in particular the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), are guiding farmers towards ever more expensive and sophisticated mechanisation. As a result, a “high-tech” and soil-less agricultural model is taking shape in Europe, with the risk of increasing farmers’ indebtedness and marginalising small-scale farming.

“Artificial intelligence” (AI) is used to extract and restructure information from raw or unstructured data. Companies are using it to identify phenotypic traits associated with genetic sequences. Referring to a recent patent application by the company Inari, the German NGO Testbiotech points out the risks associated with the combination of new genomic modification techniques (NGT) and AI. It condemns the possible abuses of patentability and the need for robust GMO regulations. However, Inari has already filed other similar applications, which raises questions about the legal impact of such rights and their adaptation to AI-driven technologies.

The digitization of living organisms is the subject of a growing number of projects. Computer data, generated and stored in ever-larger “data centers”, are used by “artificial intelligence” matrices. These data are of all kinds: genetic sequences, proteins, etc. In these fields, which require increasing natural resources, investments are multiplying.

At the end of 2024, the Netherlands initiated a process of reflection on the meaning to be given to the legal definition of a GMO, discussing the definition word by word, expression by expression. A purely intellectual exercise? Far from it! The result of this work could change the way the definition of a GMO is read… without changing the definition itself. The expected outcome of these reflections is, of course, a lighter regulatory framework.

At the European Patent Office (EPO), one of the key principles for patentability of inventions is that the invention must be described in sufficient detail for any “person skilled in the art” to be able to reproduce it. In biotechnology, where living systems are manipulated, this requirement poses a particular challenge. The notion of “reproducibility” of the invention thus becomes an essential criterion, which can take on different meanings depending on the context. This article explores the subject of the reproducibility of biotechnological inventions according to the practice of the EPO, in particular the case law of its Boards of Appeal.

Xenotransplantation in humans is the subject of one announcement after another. This involves transplanting an organ or tissue from a genetically modified animal into a human, to alleviate the shortage of human organs. The “new genomic techniques” are used to genetically modify donor animals. Does the use of these techniques raise new questions of animal ethics?