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for a responsible, fair & sustainable food system

GM Freeze tells new DEFRA officials to manage risks from new GMOs

Immediate release (29 Sep 2025)

Leonie Nimmo

Campaign group GM Freeze has today written to newly appointed officials at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) urging them to review the legislation and draft guidance in relation to new GMOs.

The GM Freeze report ‘Disaster by design: the UK’s new rules for new GMOs’ outlines many problems with the new framework, and highlights the ways in which it fails to ensure that environmental, health and socio-economic risks will be adequately managed.

GM Freeze urged DEFRA Secretary of State Emma Reynolds MP, Minister of State Dame Angela Eagle DBE MP and Chief Scientific Advisor Professor Anjali Goswami to consider whether there were ways in which they could make the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) legislation and guidance more robust.

It asked the officials to consider:

  • Measures that will enable the identification of new GMOs in farms and food supply chains.
  • Environmental risk assessments.
  • Co-existence measures to minimise the contamination risks for non-GMO producers and traders.
  • Commissioning a study on the likely impacts of patents, and how the related risks could be minimised for conventional breeders and all farmers.
  • Commissioning a study on the likely impacts on global food security and Food Sovereignty.
  • Introducing sustainability requirements for new PB-GMO varieties.

GM Freeze highlighted the scientific uncertainty about the risks posed by new GMOs, as acknowledged by government agencies in France, Germany and Austria. It noted the importance of the Precautionary Principle, as enshrined in the 2021 Environment Act, whereby an action should be avoided if there is scientific uncertainty about risks.

GM Freeze’s Leonie Nimmo said:

The new officials at DEFRA have been appointed at a critical moment for the environment, human health and food producers and consumers. Hidden GMOs are about to enter our food systems and they won’t have been assessed for risks. The incoming DEFRA top brass has got an opportunity to bake some safeguards in the system so that the risks can be adequately managed. They must not bow to biotech lobbying pressure, but act responsibly and in the interests of the public.”

ENDS

 

Notes to editors

For comments contact leonie[at]gmfreeze.org or call 0845 217 8992.

GM Freeze is a membership-based organisation that campaigns for the adequate regulation of all forms of genetically engineered organisms.

Further information on the issues raised above is available in the GM Freeze report ‘Disaster by design: the UK’s new rules for new GMOs’.

GM Freeze’s open letter to DEFRA officials is available here.

The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations were signed into law in May and will come into force in November.