A little more patience. The European Parliament’s final vote, originally scheduled for March, has been postponed to late April, but the finish line is in sight. We should finally have rules that distinguish true transgenic plants (containing foreign DNA) from edited plants that do not contain extra genes and are indistinguishable from traditional breeding programs.

In Italy, the latter are often referred to by the acronym TEA (Assisted Evolution Techniques), but the offical name is NGT1 (New Genomic Techniques category 1, to distinguish them from the so-called category 2, which is treated like traditional GMOs and includes plants in which new genomic techniques have been used to insert foreign DNA rather than to change a few letters of the original genome). The lighter regulatory framework envisaged for TEA/NGT1 will prevent CRISPR and other precision technologies from being sucked into the regulatory black hole of GMOs, and with them the loss of valuable opportunities for progress toward high-quality agriculture that is more sustainable and resilient to climate change.

With the new rules, Europe will hopefully be put in a position to compete with the rest of the world: the United Kingdom deregulated with the Precision Breeding Act approved in 2023, China is investing heavily in the sector, and the United States and South America already have well-established, favorable mechanisms in place. Of course, in Europe some final technical details still need to be defined (particularly those relating to patenting) and we hope overly cumbersome solutions will not be introduced. Negotiations have been long and complex, and another two years will pass between approval and implementation.

If we have come this far, it is thanks to the efforts of many and to the final push provided by the Danish leadership, which at the beginning of the year handed over the presidency of the EU Council to Cyprus. To learn more, we recommend the latest editorial in The CRISPR Journal, and a side-by-side comparison of the positions of the European Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament (for the Italian situation, please see Il Sole 24 Ore).