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In September 2025, the French Academy of Sciences published a summary of the risks it identified as being associated with gene drive. This technique, which emerged around ten years ago, presents a variety of potential dangers and is uncontrollable. As a result, it has not yet been deployed in the wild. However, the current context is very conducive to its development and the precautionary principle is under threat.

On Friday 19 December, the Member States meeting within the Council of the European Union reached a qualified majority agreement on a text to deregulate many GMOs. This text, negotiated two weeks earlier between representatives of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council, proposing broad deregulation of GMOs obtained through new techniques of genetic modification, has finally convinced a sufficient majority of States. The European Parliament is now due to consider it in January 2026.

In 2025, the European network of GMO laboratories (ENGL) published a report written by several of its experts on the detection and identification of genetically modified microorganisms using new techniques in the food and feed industry. According to this report, the vast majority of these micro-organisms are detectable and identifiable. However, “in somecases”, with the processes currently available, very small genetic modifications can be more complicated, or even impossible, to detect and differentiate from those that can occur without technical intervention on the genome.

The proposal to deregulate some of the GMO plants made by the European Commission in July 2023 is based in particular on the assumption that new techniques of genetic modification can produce organisms with modifications that could also be obtained using so-called “conventional” methods. To make this claim, the European Commission uses a subtle but decisive semantic abuse in its proposal…

While the European Commission is attempting to deregulate new genome modification techniques (NGT), the US company Pairwise is multiplying its “partnerships” combining the Crispr/Cas tool and its Fulcrum platform. Concluded with both private and public players, these agreements anticipate the landscape following the potential deregulation of NGT. They will also influence the conditions for the dissemination of NGT and the arrival of “Pairwise-type” products on our plates.

“How can we feed 10 billion people in 2050 with limited natural resources? To address this challenge, agritech start-ups are capitalising on the latest research findings to offer disruptive innovations and provide more efficient and environmentally friendly solutions” . This is how agritech is presented by BPI France, the French public investment bank. Once again, we see the famous promise to feed the world. To achieve this goal, we need to innovate, invest, digitise, robotise…

The development of GMOs, of the digitisation of living organisms and of the “biocontrol” are indicators of multinationals’ growing ambitions to appropriate living organisms, but not only. It is also, if not above all, a technological development which, once adopted, has a major impact on the global system that constitutes our societies and their environment. The changes are so significant that Frédéric Jacquemart refers to them as “systemic disruptions”. These disruptions should motivate our societies to adopt a global approach in order to better prepare and accept the necessary emergence of other “viable structures”, to use his wording.

For several years, EFSA and ANSES have been asking Bayer to monitor the emergence of teosinte, the wild ancestor of maize, in fields cultivated with Mon810 maize in Portugal and Spain. In 2023, the company was still not doing so. However, the presence of teosinte in Europe has been confirmed. A scientific study has even shown experimentally that the Mon810 transgene can be transmitted from maize to teosinte plants collected in Spanish fields. The production of transgenic insecticidal protein is therefore not under control.

Negotiations on the future European regulation on new genetic modification techniques have been focusing on two sensitive issues for several months: patentability and sustainability. Keen to conclude the dossier before the end of the year, the Danish Presidency is stepping up efforts to find a compromise, at the risk of neglecting issues that are of particular concern to small and medium-sized breeders and farmers. Denmark will seek an agreement this week, having already threatened to freeze discussions and refer the text back to the European Parliament for a second reading.