By the first week of October, 17 European countries — including Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland — had used new European Union rules to announce bans on the cultivation of genetically modified crops.
This ban expose the worrying reality of how far Europe has gone in setting itself against modern science, though the bans do not apply directly to scientific research. Some hope is there as few countries — led by England — have declared themselves open to cultivation of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
The move is going to de-motivate the scientific community. In fact, why would anyone invest on a technology in the knowledge that it is likely to be outlawed by the government? The ban might lead to the vanishing of an entire field of human scientific venture.
Shockingly, at present Europe now has no chief scientific adviser. Last November, the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, chose not to reappoint Prof. Anne Glover as his science adviser after lobbying by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
Facing this hostile climate, the crop biotech sector in Europe is dying. The plant science division of the agrochemical giant BASF closed its doors in Germany back in 2012, shifting some operations to the friendlier climes of the United States. In the public sector, the European Academies Science Advisory Council, the leading voice of science in Europe, lamented in 2013: “The E.U. is falling behind international competitors in agricultural innovation and this has implications for E.U. goals for science and innovation.”
It cannot be said how this new ban will impact the new gene editing tool ‘Crispr’, which is on the brink of revolutionizing the field of genetics. The Europe’s aversion to GMOs might slam the door for this technology as well.
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