Renegotiating GM crop regulation

Abstract

In 2010, more than 85% of the corn acreage and more than 90% of the soybean acreage in the USA was planted with genetically modified (GM) crops (USDA, 2010). Most of those crops contained transgenes from other species, such as bacteria, that confer resistance to herbicides or tolerance to insect pests, and that were introduced into plant cells using Agrobacterium or other delivery methods. The resulting ‘transformed’ cells were regenerated into GM plants that were tested for the appropriate expression of the transgenes, as well as for whether the crop posed an unacceptable environmental or health risk, before being approved for commercial use. The scientific advances that enabled the generation of these GM plants took place in the early 1980s and have changed agriculture irrevocably, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of GM technology. They have also triggered intense debates about the potential risks of GM crops for human health and the environment and new forms of regulation that are needed to mitigate this. There is also continued public resistance to GM crops, particularly in Europe. Plant genetic engineering is at a technological inflection point. New technologies enable more precise and subtler modification of plant genomes (Weinthal et al, 2010) than the comparably crude methods that were used to create the current stock of GM crops (Fig 1A). These methods allow scientists to insert foreign DNA into the plant genome at precise locations, remove unwanted DNA sequences or introduce subtle modifications, such as single‐base substitutions that alter the activity of individual genes. They also raise serious questions about the regulation of GM crops: how do these methods differ from existing techniques and how will the resulting products be regulated? Owing to the specificity of these methods, will resulting products fall outside existing definitions of GM crops and, as a result, be regulated similarly to conventional crops? How will the definition and regulation of GM crops be renegotiated and delineated in light of these new methods?