News

  The collapse of biodiversity (both wild and cultivated) is essentially due to human activities. Among these, industrial agriculture, with its range of fertilisers, pesticides and other harmful practices, plays a key role.   The collapse of biodiversity was once again highlighted at the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) at the Convention on Biological […]

Patents and plant breeders’ rights (PBR) are two types of intellectual property right. Both have a major impact on both cultivated and wild biodiversity. Certain intellectual property rights (IPRs) affect cultivated biodiversity, agriculture, but also wild biodiversity, which provides genetic resources [1] such as stevia or the neem tree [2]. These are patents and, for plant crops, […]

  The rampant industrialisation of our environment over the past century has led to the disappearance of many living species. This sixth mass extinction is the first one specifically attributed to human action. In the face of this observation, several political and scientific approaches have been proposed, which do not tackle the causes but try […]

Precision agriculture, the new avatar of agribusiness, invests in robotics, digital technology and genetics [1]. This technological overkill is presented as a solution to many of the failures of industrial agriculture. In the livestock sector, will it allow, as it is often put forward, to improve the living conditions of animals ? hors note that the effectiveness […]

For several decades we have been witnessing a drastic reduction in the autonomy of farmers, who have become mere labourers. Farmers may soon have to deal with the arrival of GMO animals, which will certainly reinforce this phenomenon. The stranglehold of a few companies on the animal production chain has become the norm, at least […]

In 2019, in France, 1,865,403 animals were used for experimental purposes [1]. This number of animals was fairly stable between 2015 (414,164 of which 89,708 with a damaging phenotype) and 2017 (428,606 of which 53,076 with a damaging phenotype), but a peak was observed in 2018 : 484,463 animals of which 56,412 with a damaging phenotype ; of […]

For some European animal breeding industries, new genetic modification techniques can contribute to a sustainable food system. But, they say, their use must be done with great care, so as not to jeopardise food safety and animal health and welfare. This precaution is coupled with a call for « a legal framework on imports to ensure […]

Argentina and Japan have authorised three genetically modified fish using the Crispr/Cas9 molecular tool. For these two countries, these are not GMOs. In December 2018, in Argentina, a genetically modified (GM) tilapia produced by AquaBounty was exempted from the marketing authorisation requirement [1]. A victory for the same company, which had taken almost twenty years to […]

The current trend is for livestock farms to obey the « triptych » : digital, robotic, genetic technologies. This is in the name of innovation, profitability and, curiously, in the name of “animal welfare” [1]. Currently, very few GM animals are marketed and sales remain very low. As with plants, genetic engineering aims to accelerate the selection of certain […]