December 4, 2025 by Beyond GM
EU negotiators announced last night that they have struck a provisional agreement on new genomic techniques (NGTs).
The outgoing – and pro-GMO – Danish Presidency of the European Council will be congratulating itself on a just-in-time deal, as Greece prepares to take over the revolving Council presidency in January. But the very disappointing deal abandons all the precautionary advances made by the European Parliament during the lengthy negotiations over this complex file. It deregulates an entire class of GM plants – known in the EU as “new genomic techniques” or NGTs – and keeps the public largely in the dark about their presence in the food chain.
Amazingly, it still manages to be more transparent than the UK’s weird “precision breeding” regime.
The provisional deal creates two categories of NGT plants:
For NGT1 plants, the deal treats these as equivalent to conventional plants once they have passed a light-touch administrative check.
There will be no risk assessment, no monitoring, and no traceability, no liability regime, no meaningful coexistence safeguards for organic, conventional or GMO-free supply chains and no mechanism to withdraw approval if risks emerge later. It is thought that 94% of NGTs will be deregulated as NGT1.
While seeds and other plant reproductive materials must be labelled as NGT1 and listed as such in official databases, this information will not follow the crop along the feed and food chain since the deal does not require product labelling for NGTs
For NGT2 plants, the existing regime, including full GMO-style authorisation, traceability and labelling will continue to apply.
In addition, member states will retain an opt-out, allowing them to ban cultivation of NGT2 crops on their territory – a small but important concession.
There is another notable constraint: herbicide-tolerant plants and plants engineered to produce known insecticidal substances (e.g. Bt-like traits) are explicitly excluded from NGT1 and pushed into NGT2, so these remain fully regulated and labelled. These few concessions are limited but genuine wins in an otherwise highly deregulatory regime.
Herbicide-tolerant plants and plants engineered to produce known insecticidal substances (e.g. Bt-like traits) are explicitly excluded from NGT1 and pushed into NGT2, so they remain fully regulated and labelled
One of the hottest issues in the negotiations was whether NGTs – which developers claim are ‘essentially natural’ should be granted patents. Civil society, small breeders and many farmers warned that opening the door to patents on NGT plants would accelerate corporate control of seeds and squeeze smaller actors out of the market.
In the final deal patents on NGT traits and plants remain possible wherever existing EU biotech patent rules allow.
According to the ENVI Press release companies registering NGT1 plants will have to declare any existing or pending patents, and the Commission will create a public patent information database. The Commission must also draw up a non-binding “code of conduct” on patent licensing within 18 months of entry into force.
The European Council press release confirms the creation of a patenting expert group, focusing on the effect of patents on NGT plants and that one year after the entry into force of the regulation, the EU Commission will publish a study on the impact of patenting and conduct a study on the impacts of patents on breeders, farmers and seed availability.
From the civil society perspective, all of this is far too weak and is the result of efforts to strengthen the text being blocked at a high political level.
In practical terms, the structural power imbalance around NGTs remain intact. Large seed and biotech firms retain the ability to patent NGT traits, while farmers and smaller breeders get transparency and limited process, but not real protection.
“This imperfect proposal is very disappointing but has, nevertheless, conceded some real safeguards that civil society fought hard for…These are not small victories. They show that limits are necessary and that transparency is important and achievable when governments value it.” — Pat Thomas, Director, Beyond GM
Officially, the provisional deal is being sold as a way to “boost competitiveness”, “support the green transition” and “do more with less” by delivering plants that are more resilient to climate stresses and need fewer fertilisers and pesticides.
Civil society, however, notes significant and meaningful precautionary measures have been stripped away. The deal aims to normalise GMOs in the NGT1 category as “just plants” – even though they are engineered using powerful, relatively new lab-based technologies, and will be released into highly complex agro-ecosystems without systematic oversight.
During the negotiations, the organic and GMO-free sectors had drawn a clear red line around traceability, labelling and patents and clear co-existence measures. These core demands support freedom of choice for farmers, processors and citizens.
This proposed agreement crosses that line: organic production is formally kept NGT-free, but unavoidable presence of NGT1 will not count as non-compliance, and there is no robust system for keeping contamination out in the first place. Member states are not obliged to adopt coexistence measures (buffer zones, etc necessary for organic and non-GMO farmers). They may do so, but only for NGT2.
The result is a predictable clash of narratives:
The deal aims to normalise GMOs in the NGT1 category as “just plants” – even though they are engineered using powerful, relatively new technologies.
From a UK perspective, the obvious question is: is the EU now “catching up” with the UK’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, or heading in a different direction?
There are some key similarities:
But there are also important differences – and they don’t flatter the UK.
Labelling and traceability
In other words, the EU is moving towards half-hidden GMOs, whereas the UK is pressing ahead with fully hidden GMOs.
Scope and categories
Political and trade context
For UK farmers, exporters and regulators, the result is likely to be continued friction: EU law will still treat many UK precision-bred products as GMOs requiring authorisation, while the UK will be putting unlabelled NGT products on the market with no plan to distinguish these in order to acknowledge overwhelming consumer preference and support the organic and non-GMO sector.
The government has tried to reassure worried developers that it will seek an exemption for its agricultural genetic technology agenda, but given the relative power imbalance at play, the UK may well have to abandon its puffery and concede.
On one hand, the EU’s clear decision to label NGT1 seeds and maintain full labelling and traceability for NGT2 plants is a reminder that transparency is a political choice, not a technical impossibility. It undermines the argument – still heard in Westminster and at the FSA – that consumers can’t have transparency because detection is too hard, too expensive and/or labels would be too confusing for them.
On the other hand, the EU’s move towards deregulating NGT1 will likely be used in the UK debate to claim that “everyone is doing it now” and that any attempt to restore stricter rules here is “anti-science” or “out of step with Europe”.
The deeper problem – visible on both sides of the Channel – is that governments are putting gene editing at the centre of their agricultural strategy while:
Beyond GM Director Pat Thomas notes, “This deeply flawed proposal is very disappointing but has, nevertheless, conceded some real safeguards that civil society fought hard for – seed labelling, public registers, and keeping a whole class of gene edited GMOs under full regulation. These are not small victories. They show that limits are necessary and that transparency is important and achievable when governments value it. The UK, however, has opted for a regime with none of these protections. In all its bluster and blather about being ‘world-leading’, Westminster is increasingly looking like a world outlier”
According to the European Commission, the proposal must be formally endorsed by Agriculture Ministers in Council and by the European Parliament in second reading.
In the UK the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025 are currently (mostly) operational – though marketing of a whole range of products (arable crops and some produce such as tomatoes and potatoes) remains illegal until the government decides if and how these will be listed on the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Variety Lists. The only strand of the Regulations that is currently fully operational is the provision for open field trials – and these can be conducted anywhere and at any time, for any purpose, in England based on developer self-certification of their safety and appropriateness.
Beyond GM’s judicial review, which has had significant public support, will test whether a regime with no safety testing, no labelling and no meaningful traceability is compatible with basic consumer rights, farmers’ rights and the UK’s wider legal obligations.
Defra is also working on a separate strategy for gene-edited livestock, which would take UK deregulation further than anything currently on the EU table. Defra has said the draft secondary legislation should be ready by the summer of 2026.
Taken together, these developments point to a rapidly diverging, but equally problematic, trans-European trajectory:
For those who care about honesty in the food system, democratic control of technology and the right to farm and eat GM-free, the fight clearly isn’t over – on either side of the Channel.
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