New GMOs must be evaluated for safety – and if they are put on the market, they must be labelled and tracked, says seed group

The European Court of Justice has announced that it will decide on the legal status of GMOs produced with new GM techniques on 25 July.[1] Whatever its judgement, it is the European Union that will have to decide how the decision is to be applied.

Every day, the agricultural GMO industry invents new terms that create a thick cloud of smoke to hide its genetic manipulations. For example, it claims to only resort to simple “improvements” such as those produced through traditional mutagenesis, which is a technique that produces unregulated GMOs.

Certainly, a number of new genetic engineering techniques utilise mutagenesis. However, in addition to mutagenesis, they all involve other techniques that unquestionably produce regulated GMOs. These techniques include the multiplication of plant cells isolated in vitro in laboratories before they are transformed into new plants or new animals, or the introduction in laboratories of biological material via transgenesis to animal or plant cells to cause genetic modifications.