Last chance to have your say on GM seed labelling

Dear Members and Supporters,

The government’s consultation on whether the seeds of new GMOs will be labelled closes at midnight tonight, 14th April 2025. We are urging everyone who cares about the food they eat to respond. Without labelling it will be incredibly difficult for food businesses to maintain non-GMO supply chains. People will plant, grow and harvest new GMOs without knowing it. They will involuntarily release them into the environment, or feed them to their family.

• Respond to the consultation here to call for mandatory labelling of new GM seeds.
• Here is a link to the pdf document, for those who want to view all the questions in advance.
• See our guidance for issues you may want to raise in your response, and for suggestions of ways to navigate the tricky consultation.

These GMOs are called something new by the Westminster government – Precision Bred Organisms. But they have been developed using biotechnology, not breeding, and many of the old concerns remain. They will not undergo environmental risk assessment or independent safety testing. They also carry with them the threat of patents that could restrict conventional breeding and decrease biodiversity, as well as increase costs to farmers and consumers.

The government says that they could have occurred through conventional breeding, but is it really possible for a naturally-occurring strawberry to ripen without sunlight? Or a banana to not turn brown? These are the crops that a parliamentary committee used to promote the GenTech Regulations when they passed them earlier this month. They don’t sound very healthy to us. Bananas turn brown for a reason!

Although the Regulations for plants, food and feed are now a done deal, we still have a chance to call for new GMO seeds to be labelled by responding to the consultation.

The Consultation is directed at businesses but it will affect everyone who buys seeds, as well as their customers and communities. Following feedback from our members and supporters that the public feels excluded from this public consultation, we have raised a complaint with DEFRA. See our Press Release.

For more information on the deregulation of new GMOs, see This Changes Everything: New GMOs coming soon.

Window closing to respond to new GMO seed consultation. Image: Alex Evans

SOURCE: GM Freeze newsletter

Hidden Information and Misleading Claims Define the UK’s GMO Deregulation Agenda

It happened on April Fools’ day but it was no joke.

As our supporters will know, in February Defra tabled a statutory instrument with new regulations for the Genetic Technology Act, which would allow genetically modified precision-bred organisms (GM-PBOs) to be planted and sold in England without environmental or safety checks or labelling.

These have been moving swiftly through the parliamentary process.

After a critical review of the regulations by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and a deeply misleading consideration in the Delegated Legislation Committee, MPs in the House of Commons quietly nodded through their approval of the new regulations. There is still a debate in the Lords to come which will give some airtime to Green Peer Natalie Bennett’s Motion of Regret – and the debate on labelling is not yet over.

Here’s the story of how it has all played out so far.

Criticisms of lack of transparency
The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (SLSC), whose job is to consider the policy implications of statutory instruments, delivered an important reality check about the draft regulations. In its 20th Report the Committee raised multiple concerns including:

• Regulatory ambiguity over what constitutes a PBO
• Lack of traceability and labelling
• Impacts of lack of traceability on organic and GM-free supply chains
• Trade risks with the EU

In calling out the government’s refusal to label GM-PBOs, the report said that the expectation that consumers should research this information themselves through technical registers was “neither realistic nor reasonable.“

Many of these concerns were raised by us in our submission to the committee and it was gratifying to see Beyond GM appear prominently throughout the report. Given its concerns, the committee concluded that “a policy of maximum transparency around these concerns should be the norm. The House may wish to question the Minister further on the issues raised.”

Government tries to hide skimpy data
On the issue of transparency, the SLSC particularly drew attention to a strong consumer preference for labelling and questioned the government’s claim that only a minority of consumers would avoid precision-bred foods, noting this was based on unpublished government polling data that “cannot be verified.”

When the SLSC asked to see Defra’s polling, it refused saying the data was for “internal use only.” The committee explicitly said this was “not an acceptable use of data” and criticised Defra for selectively using research to “justify potentially contentious policy decisions” while keeping the complete findings hidden from public scrutiny.

The story could have ended there. But on publication of the SLSC report, Liberal Democrat Peer Mark Pack, who produces a newsletter called The Week In Polls, also expressed concern about a government agency using private polling to justify public policy. His newsletter piece is interesting (though we would have liked to see fewer misleading talking points about PBOs not being GMOs – see Emma Hardy below).

Concerned about the lack of transparency, he sent a request to YouGov to publish the data, citing British Polling Council’s rules. The data is now public and shows how flimsy the government’s case is.

Labelling of precision-bred plant varieties
There is another chance to ensure labelling and therefore a credible audit trail for GM-PBOs. The government is now seeking feedback on how to manage genetically modified precision-bred plant varieties and seeds in England. This new consultation, aimed primarily at affected businesses, focuses on the creation of a mandatory Precision-bred Plant Variety List as part of the National Seed List and the mandatory labelling of seed packets.

For those who need or want to maintain non-GMO supply chains, this consultation is critically important and the deadline for responding – April 14th – is rapidly approaching. We have spent weeks reaching out to and meeting with businesses across the UK and produced guidance for how businesses should respond. You can find this, along with our own submission here.

If you are a business that wants to be GM-free (farmers, seed companies, nurseries and especially organic farmers, growers and food businesses) please respond.

Even if you are not a business you can respond. Down the line, the outcome of the consultation will also affect people who use and buy seeds in their gardens and allotments. Our friends at GM Freeze have produced guidance on how individuals rather than businesses could respond here.

Time to stop the hype
After the SLSC, the statutory instrument was considered by the Delegated Legislation Committee (DLC). Beyond GM has made a formal complaint about seriously misleading statements made by Emma Hardy MP during the DLC’s consideration of the Instrument.

In her role as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defra, Ms. Hardy repeatedly and wrongly stated that precision-bred organisms (PBOs) are not GMOs, despite both scientific consensus and the legislation itself defining them as a type of genetically modified organism.

She falsely claimed that gene editing doesn’t involve foreign DNA, when in fact the editing process itself typically requires introducing foreign DNA through bacterial vectors. She made unsubstantiated claims for economic and other benefits. In one instance, she cited a figure for lost income in the UK due to not deregulating GM-PBOs of up to $356 billion (more than the value of the entire UK agri-food chain). This figure was based on global modelling in a report focused on the EU – not the UK – and, worse, did not specifically refer to agricultural genetic modification but for all uses of biotechnology.

She underplayed the concerns raised by the SLSC, notably omitting its criticism that Defra’s Impact Assessment for the Genetic Technology Act had been deemed “not fit for purpose.“

The government’s pattern of strategic misrepresentation and overstatement around agricultural biotechnology has reached dangerous new heights and is undermining transparency and public accountability on a crucial food system issue.

We think enough is enough and are calling for these errors to be corrected on the Parliamentary record.

We’ll keep you posted!

Pat Thomas and Lawrence Woodward

SOURCE: Beyond GM Newsletter

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