The Westminster Government’s damaging Genetic Technology Bill, that will impose untested – and unlabelled – GMOs on the entire UK food chain, has passed its final stages in the House of Lords and will soon become law.
Some changes were approved by peers and these are welcome, especially one that recognised the key role played by regulatory DNA that can control when and how other genes are expressed. However, the Government simply wouldn’t budge on big issues like labelling and risk assessments. That means that the bill will:
Invent a new class of “precision bred” GMOs on the basis that they “could have resulted from traditional processes”. This is a problem because the way that a genetic change comes about makes all the difference to what can go wrong along the way.
Dismantle the safety net of independent risk assessments for GMOs judged to meet the new “precision bred” criteria. This amounts to leaving developers to check their own homework.
Remove our right to choose because there will be no legal requirment to label foods containing “precision bred organisms” or to ensure they don’t contaminate the non-GM supply chain.
You can find out more about the bill, read detailed GM Freeze briefings and follow links to recordings of each parliamentary debate, on the bill page of our website.
There is currently no timetable for the two procedural steps left before the bill becomes an Act of Parliament, but that end result is now, sadly, inevitable. I wish we could have stopped it, but this is not the end.
https://mailchi.mp/94adab09a0f0/genetic-technology-bill-will-become-law?e=c9369a1fb5
