Three organizations fighting for farmers‘ and consumers’ rights are appealing to the Regional Administrative Tribunal to request the disapplication of the law simplifying the rules for new GMO field trials on Italian soil. The associations are the Centro Internazionale Crocevia, the Italian Rural Association (ARI) and the Association of Grassroots Consumers (A.Ba.Co).
The appeal is addressed to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE), and the bodies that requested and obtained permission to carry out open-field experiments, i.e. the Edmund Mach Foundation and the Public Council for Agricultural Research and Analysis of Agricultural Economics (CREA).
The associations challenged the MASE decrees of 19 December and 7 January authorising field trials of OGM vine and tomato respectively. The first followed the request made by the Trentino Foundation, which intends to test a laboratory modified vine on its land to observe possible resistance to downy mildew. The second decree kicked authorised the CREA section in Pontecagnano to plant genetically modified tomatoes that allegedly resist parasitic plants. The field that would host this second experiment is the Podere Stuard, an experimental farm with the contradiction of also having land cultivated organically, a regime that bans GMOs at every stage of the supply chain.
These contested measures were adopted by the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security according to the procedures provided for in Article 9 bis of Law Decree no. 39 of 13 April 2023, converted with amendments by Law no. 68 of 13 June 2023. This is the so-called ‘Drought Decree’, in which the amendment facilitating experimentation was included. In practice, on the one hand, the risk assessment for agrobiodiversity, agricultural systems and the agri-food chain was abolished. On the other, a fundamental obligation, that of consultation with the public, in particular stakeholders, has been circumvented. This constitutes a violation of the precautionary principle and of European Directive 2001/18 on GMOs, which requires public consultation as a fundamental step of the experimentation proceeding. Therefore, the Associations’ request to the judge is to disapply the law into which the Drought Decree is translated and to annul the authorisation measures for the Mach Foundation and CREA.
‘We do not tolerate this authoritarian twist and continuous abuse of politics to favour the interests of a few laboratory food supporters,’ the plaintiffs declare. ‘Italy has been a GMO-free country for 25 years and this has allowed farmers to maintain biodiversity better than elsewhere, conserve and reproduce their seeds, adapt crops to their territories, and guarantee quality products. The new GMOs, renamed New Genomic Techniques (NGT) by lobbyists interested in confusing public opinion, present the same problems as ever in terms of health and environmental risks. Moreover, they are patentable products and will lead to a huge concentration of the seed market in the hands of a few multinationals, a reduction in biodiversity and increased costs for farmers and small seed companies’.
The three associations also point out that there is no legal difference today between GMOs and those renamed NGT (‘TEA’ in Italy), as established by a 2018 EU Court of Justice ruling. Precisely as a result of that slap in the face, the European Commission, pushed by the agrochemical and agro-industrial lobbies, began operations to write a new regulation tailor-made for these new GMOs. The intention is to exempt them from the current rules, which include traceability, labelling and risk assessment, as well as allowing EU countries to ban their cultivation for socio-economic reasons. However, this ad hoc regulation is still at the negotiation stage and – incidentally – is opposed by many countries to deregulation. As long as this attempt to force reality is not completed, therefore, there can be no dedicated exemption for these organisms in Italy. Not even for experimentation. NGTs are GMOs, and must be treated as GMOs.
