Gene-edited food laws altered in UK

This week, the UK government began the process of bringing gene-edited food into law. And that will allow for the sale of crops that have had improvements made to them by science. The new genetic technology bill, as it's called, will replace an existing EU moratorium on growing food that had been modified in this way and it will allow scientists to use tools like the gene editing system known as CRISPR to improve their crop yields, build in disease resistance, or even give plants added nutritional benefits. Now critics on the other hand are calling the bill GM crops, but with better PR. Although the government was intending to follow this course of action anyway, it was the looming food security crisis that led to the bill being expedited. James Tytko spoke with Gideon Henderson, who's the chief scientific advisor to DEFRA, that's the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs....

Gideon - I think there are a couple of important things that have changed. One of which is that the public have got much more used to people talking about genetic information. It's quite a long time now of course, since the 1990s, and in that time we've seen really substantial benefits to human health and use of genetic information in biomedical processes. There was also quite a genuine concern in the 1990s of how this was actually playing into the hands of big business rather than helping food producers or helping the public. And I think this time around things are very different in that gene editing is a very accessible tool, which smaller businesses can use, and it's much easier to get into that market.

James - This new bill obviously has a degree of urgency with the food security issues, but does it feel also like the right time to be pushing this legislation forward when trust in scientists is perhaps at a bit of a high?

Gideon - I don't think it hurts at all that scientists have been so useful to the public in the last couple of years, but that doesn't explain the timing. The timing is more explained by the combination of the development of the tools that enable this precision breeding and this accurate gene editing, and also the UK leaving the EU so that we're now able to reexamine the regulation ourselves independently.

James - What benefits can we expect to see once this passes?

Gideon - Many other countries have been enabling gene editing of crops for some time now, so perhaps the most immediate change that we might see as consumers in this country is that products that have beneficial qualities for us as humans, or for the way that they're grown, on our shelves as a consequence of what's happened elsewhere. But even more exciting from a UK perspective, and in the only slightly longer term, I think we're going to see new crops developed, which will provide significant benefits to the environment and significant benefits to human health through their consumption, and increase productivity of our land so that we might free up some land area.

James - The bill also will enable the development of precision-bred animals as well. Can you tell me a bit about that and when we might see that come into practice?

Gideon - Well, as a nice example, is there's a porcine respiratory disease, which is endemic in this country and in many other countries, which causes a great deal of suffering for animals and dramatically lowers productivity of pig farming. And it's been demonstrated by UK scientists that we can develop a breed of pig that is resistant to that respiratory disease and that will be an early win by which we can both increase productivity and decrease animal suffering.

James - Currently, no UK supermarket is willing to say it will stock gene-edited food. New Scientist contacted eleven of the UK's biggest supermarkets, none responded to confirm. So clearly they're being very cautious; there's still a hangover from the GM crops debate. You'd have thought bringing down the cost of food would only serve their interests, really?

Gideon - Retailers are, as you suggest, fairly positive and supportive of the ability to make better, healthier food with less environmental consequence. It does make sense that an individual retailer might be resistant to come out and support as a single entity. But I don't have the sense that any retailer is hostile to these changes either. They're just not willing to be the first one to put their head above the parapet.

James - There could be other benefits of this in the long-term. I'm thinking about opportunities for countries in the developing world, for example, where some of the main exports of food crops, they might be able to grow plants that have a longer shelf life or produce a bigger yield, which before had the stumbling block of not fitting our regulations.

Gideon - Certainly many areas will be under significant heat stress and sometimes water stress in the future as climate changes, and building crops that are more resilient will be much easier using gene editing approaches than relying only on more traditional breeding approaches. So we can help to really secure food supply across the world. And one example that I like here is rice blight, which is a disease that can significantly lower the output and the productivity of rice crops around the world. And of course we don't grow rice in the UK, but it's really important in Southeast Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly west Africa where rice blight can significantly damage productivity. There are proven gene editing approaches by which we might make rice resistant to rice blight and therefore be able to eradicate some of those problems or much improve them.