The European Union recently agreed to ease restrictions on new genomic techniques (NGTs) for food, in the most significant change to Europe’s stringent regulatory approach to crop biotechnology in two decades. Following Europe’s broader deregulatory push since 2024, its latest action falls short of a full normalization of genetically engineered organisms (GEOs) in the European food system. But it is an important break from the precautionary reflex that has long shaped EU policy. The eased regulations may also have large and positive effects for lower- and middle-income countries dealing with rising food insecurity.
What the EU did
The European Union recently adopted a significant reform of rules regarding genetically engineered organisms (GEOs). Under the new regulation, gene editing of crops (which speeds up natural evolutionary processes by editing the genes of an organism) is redefined. The new EU regulation refers to this process as new genomic techniques (NGTs) that do not contain DNA from other organisms (genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, derisively termed “Frankenfoods” by skeptics in the 1990s). The European Union’s regulatory framework distinguishes between two tiers: 1) gene-edited plants that closely resemble conventionally bred varieties, and 2) those with more complex modifications, with the former facing lighter regulatory processes and the latter retaining stricter oversight. Accordingly, food crops falling in the first category will be regulated as conventional agricultural products rather than as GMOs. This shift will make it easier for researchers and farmers to develop and plant more climate- and pest-resilient and nutrient-rich foods while maintaining stricter rules around GMOs.
For decades, Europe’s stringent food-safety rules have been a source of concern among food exporters. Many Europeans are no doubt concerned about the safety of their food, but the rules have also functioned as a form of de facto protection for domestic agriculture. With discriminatory, targeted tariffs once again (and lamentably) becoming normalized as a tool of economic statecraft, EU member states may no longer feel the need to use food safety rules as a backdoor means of shielding their farmers from global competition. This is not a return to agricultural tariffs, which never disappeared, but a shift toward their selective use that erodes the most-favored-nation principle. That shift creates political space for a more honest, science-based discussion of crop biotechnology at a moment when global hunger is once again rising.
Why it matters for the developing world
After decades of progress, the world is once again losing ground in the fight to feed itself. In 2017, both the number (572 million) and share (~7.5 percent) of undernourished people were at their lowest levels in recorded history. But the COVID-19 pandemic and a surge in armed conflicts reversed those gains, pushing global hunger sharply upward. By 2025, 319 million people—nearly the population of the United States—face acute hunger, and nearly 700 million are undernourished.
Many countries are fighting hunger without these gene-engineered (GE) and GMO crops. Billions live in low- and middle-income countries such as Kenya, Madagascar, and India that either prohibit GEO cultivation or impose major restrictions on the cultivation or import of GE crops (India permits only pest-resistant cotton). GEOs have vast potential to help farmers in low- and middle-income countries adapt to climate change by introducing more drought- and heat-tolerant traits into widely traded staples like wheat, maize, and rice and also regionally important staples not typically found in US or European supermarkets. These staples include millet, cowpeas, cassava, and taro—crops that are not widely traded enough to attract private sector investment but form the bedrock of food security in many developing regions.
Many of these countries maintain restrictions on these crucial technologies in part because they want to export agricultural goods to the European Union and have to comply with Europe’s regulations to do so. The European Union is the world’s second-largest food import market, historically the epicenter of regulatory hesitancy around GEOs, and one that faces only trace levels of chronic food insecurity.
The World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the US National Academy of Sciences, the UK Royal Society, and even Europe’s own European Academies Science Advisory Council have all concluded that GEO crops pose no greater risks to the environment or to food safety than conventional seed breeding. So why has Europe been so reluctant to embrace them?
In the mid-1990s, Europe initially embraced GEO crops, approving glyphosate-tolerant soybeans for import and pest-resistant Bt corn for planting under a new coordinated approval process. But at the same time, the European Union reformed its common agricultural policy to end price supports, and the Uruguay Round curtailed its ability to use tariffs and export subsidies to protect farmers from cheaper GMO imports from the Americas and the former Soviet grain belt. The combination left European farmers feeling vulnerable.
Then came the United Kingdom’s mad cow crisis in the late 1990s—a food safety failure rooted in feed practices and prion disease, not genetic engineering. Nevertheless, the mad cow outbreak shattered public trust in food regulators. Environmental groups seized the moment, amplifying skepticism about genetic engineering. This clear public policy failure demanded action. But the form that action took had nothing to do with the failures that had allowed the mad cow outbreak.
Facing stiff competition from the United States—where GM adoption was rapid—and with constrained latitude to use tariffs, governments in France, Austria, Denmark, and Greece began delaying or denying GEO approvals despite positive safety assessments. By 2003, the European Union had enshrined a precautionary regulatory regime that, while not grounded in science, has effectively protected its agricultural sector from GEO imports. This is what Pascal Lamy, former EU trade commissioner and director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), called “precautionism”: using the precautionary principle as pretext for protectionism rather than a science-based tool for assessing health risks.
Europe’s caution was understandable in the wake of a major health crisis and broader reform of its common agriculture policy, but the costs of that caution have not fallen entirely on Europe. Europe can broadly afford GEO hesitancy and higher food prices; poorer countries and people cannot. But because Europe is a critical export market, many low- and middle-income countries have adopted similarly restrictive policies for GEOs in part to ensure their products are not barred from entry into Europe.
GEO hesitancy manifests differently in post-colonial countries, many of which view GEOs as tools of neocolonial subjugation that further agribusiness interests in the Global North. But Global South opposition to GEOs creates barriers to public investment in genetic engineering technology that could bring significant benefits without ceding food sovereignty. This is why the recent EU reform matters. By distinguishing between different types of genomic techniques and easing approval pathways, the European Union has taken a first step toward more closely aligning policy with science—and opening space for trade partners to do the same.
As discriminatory tariffs reemerge as tools of economic statecraft, the European Union has an opportunity to adopt a more permissive regulatory posture for certain gene-engineered crops, disentangling consumer protection from agricultural protectionism. If Europe wants to protect its farmers, it should do so transparently: with bound tariffs, emergency safeguards, or quotas as allowed by the WTO, rather than via a science-misaligned regulatory stance. That transparency would free poorer countries to make their own science-based choices and accelerate crop innovation where it is most needed. Europe’s recent modification of its restrictions on genetically engineered crops is a step in that direction. Its action holds out the hope that further progress is scientifically possible and politically feasible.
Data Disclosure
This publication does not include a replication package.
