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HANOI, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Thursday called for developing organic and smart farming with the involvement of private businesses and cooperatives, pledging to introduce to the world Vietnam's clean farm produce.

Phuc made the remarks while addressing a launching ceremony of a high-tech agricultural fair in Vietnam's northern Ha Nam province, some 60 km south of capital Hanoi.

Until this obstacle is overcome, the technology is unlikely to succeed in the wild.

In the small city of Terni in central Italy, researchers are putting the final touches on what could be the world’s most sophisticated mosquito cages. The enclosures, each occupying 150 cubic metres, simulate the muggy habitats in which Africa’s Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes thrive. By studying the insects under more-natural conditions, scientists hope to better understand how to eradicate them — and malaria — using an emerging genetic-engineering technology called gene drives.

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The Target Malaria team has developed a second generation of gene-drive mosquitoes, hoping to slow the development of resistance, says Andrea Crisanti, a molecular parasitologist at Imperial College London. The researchers plan to test them in their new Italian facility later this year to get a sense of how the mosquitoes might fare in the wild. But molecular biologist Tony Nolan, also at Imperial, expects evolution to throw up some surprises. He says that his greatest worry about gene drives is that they simply won’t work.

Artificial Biology:

In 2016, we found ourselves spending more and more time tracking the overrunning frontiers of synthetic biology, genome editing, gene drives, molecular communication and beyond.

Gene Editing: As predicted, the CRISPR gene editing technique continued to be “a very big thing” through 2016. As science served up gene-edited dinners as PR stunts in both Sweden and New York, it seemed a new nutritious CRISPR product in development was being announced monthly: chickens, mushrooms, corn. The heavyweight patent bust-up of the year over who actually gets to own CRISPR finally hit the courtroom in December, and the licensing battle also got underway. Harvard’s Broad Institute/Editas licensed to Monsanto, while Berkley’s Doudna Lab/Caribou Biosciences licensed to DuPont and Max Planck's Charpentier lab licensed to syn bio leader Evolva. It also became clear that a CRISPR-plus future is waiting in the wings — several similar gene editing techniques with catchy names such as NgAgo and 16sRNA became public this year, Monsanto licensed an additional CRISPR variant (CPF1) and in an interesting twist in the CRISPR patent battle, Cellectis claimed their foundational patents may undercut the whole gene editing field including CRISPR.

Gene Drives: More out of control than a AI Uber car is the rapidly emerging development of gene drives — gene-edited organisms deliberately designed to spread in the wild by sexual reproduction (sex drives?) to take over and crash wild populations and species. In 2016, mega-foundations run by Bill Gates and India’s Tata conglomerate each poured around $70–$75 million apiece into the gene drive race. Investment-wise, the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is the dark horse, with an unknown amount invested in its ‘safe genes’ project, which ostensibly aims to find ways to recall rogue gene drives back out of the environment. In other contingency plans to re-close Pandora’s Box, in June, alpha gene drive jockey Kevin Esvelt of MIT introduced his safety idea of ‘local gene drives’ with his ‘daisy drive’ proposal. In ETC’s view, daisy drives may perversely accelerate gene drive releases by rendering the field more commercially interesting. Esvelt’s pronouncements on gene drives swing erratically between eagerness and caution. We suspect he was behind the Broad Institute’s intriguing decision to stipulate in Monsanto’s CRISPR licensing agreement that they could not use CRISPR for gene drives or terminator technology. ETC Group is sceptical that withholding a few patent keys will stop corporate, military or other interests from taking joy rides on gene drives.

Culture of Disruption

Interviewed by Tracy Frisch

For 20 years, Jim Thomas has been at the forefront of international policy debates and campaigns on emerging technologies with Greenpeace International and ETC Group. Steward Brand called him “the leading critic of biotech.”

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ACRES U.S.A. I had never heard of gene drives until I started preparing for this interview.

THOMAS. ETC Group is probably more concerned about gene drives than almost any other technology. A gene drive is a genetic element that will reliably get passed on from one generation to another. It has been thought that there are natural gene drives where a particular genetic trait is encoded in the genome in such a way that it will more likely or always get passed on to the next generation. With the CRISPR gene drive, which is what we’re interested in, it’s possible to engineer a particular genetic trait into an organism so that it always gets passed onto the next generation. If you engineer a fruit fly with a gene drive that makes it have red eyes, then all its offspring will have red eyes, as will all their offspring, so the entire fruit fly population will have red eyes. In normal Mendelian genetics you could assume that a trait will get passed on 50 percent of the time and 50 percent of the time it won’t. With this gene drive, 100 percent of the time the trait gets passed on. What’s significant about gene drives is their ability to relentlessly spread a genetically engineered trait through a population until ultimately you change or destroy an entire species. A lot of gene drive research aims to render a species of mosquito or parasite extinct.

California can require Monsanto to label its popular weed-killer Roundup as a possible cancer threat despite an insistence from the chemical giant that it poses no risk to people, a judge tentatively ruled Friday.

California would be the first state to order such labeling if it carries out the proposal.

Monsanto had sued the nation's leading agricultural state, saying California officials illegally based their decision for carrying the warnings on an international health organization based in France.

Monsanto attorney Trenton Norris argued in court Friday that the labels would have immediate financial consequences for the company. He said many consumers would see the labels and stop buying Roundup.

A Fresno County Superior Court judge has ruled against chemical giant Monsanto in its fight to prevent California regulators from listing the key ingredient in its popular weed killer Roundup as a carcinogen.

The tentative ruling, issued Friday by Judge Kristi Culver Kapetan, was welcomed by environmental advocates, their attorneys and those who say they got cancer from using the weed killer.

“I don’t want anyone to go through what I have gone through,” said John Barton, a Bakersfield farmer who believes the use of Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

On Friday, the representatives of the 28 EU member states refused to authorise the cultivation of three genetically modified seeds.

They have also refused to sign up to the seeds' prohibition. The member states decided to leave this decision in the hands of the European Commission, the latter says.

The vote was organised by the European Executive within a specific technical committee. This is the first of its kind, since new legislation adopted in 2015 came into force. This allowed member states to request prohibition in all or part of their particular state of GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) culture.

Seventeen member states (Bulgaria, Germany, Cyprus, Latvia, Greece, Croatia, France, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Italy, Slovenia, Malta, Luxembourg and Denmark) have thus decided to refuse GMO culture. Equally so have four regions, being Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Wallonia.

27 JANUARY 2017

Today, EU governments opposed the European Commission's proposal to authorise the first new GM crops for cultivation since 1998, but failed to achieve the necessary majority for the proposal to be formally shelved.

Governments voted on a proposal to authorise two new strains of GM maize, and the reauthorisation of the one strain of GM maize that is currently grown in the EU.

A majority of national governments rejected the proposal but failed to get the qualified majority necessary to ban the GM crops outright. It is now up to the Commission to decide whether to reject the three crops or table another with governments.

Press release - January 27, 2017

Brussels – National government representatives voting today did not provide the support needed by the European Commission to approve two new genetically modified (GM) crops and extend approval of the only GM crop currently grown in the EU. The vote shows that the Commission is a long way from achieving the qualified majority needed for the approval of the three pesticide-producing GM maizes.

Greenpeace EU food policy director Franziska Achterberg said: “Today’s vote is a clear sign that there is still no appetite for GM crops in Europe. Most countries failed to support the Commission’s proposals, despite the fact that they can now ban their cultivation nationally. Given the widespread opposition to GM crops among EU citizens and parliamentarians, the Commission would be blind to interpret this as a green light. GM crops are nothing but a prop for the harmful, intensive agriculture that is promoted by agrochemical companies. Europe should turn the page on GMOs once and for all, and focus its efforts on the urgently needed shift to ecologically sound farming.”

No new GM plants have been authorised for cultivation in the EU in almost 20 years. In the coming weeks, the European Commission will submit to the Member States’ experts three draft regulations aimed at the authorisation for cultivation in the EU of two GM maize varieties (Bt11 and 1507) and at the renewal of one further variety- Mon 810. There is a high risk that these regulations will pass, even though a clear majority of EU citizens is against the use of biotechnologies in fields and food.

The European Parliament has already made its view clear, as it objected to these three authorization proposals back at the beginning of October. The responsibility is now in the hands of the Member States to do likewise, and you can make the difference!

There are ample reasons not to allow GM cultivation in the EU. Biotechnologies allow privatisation of seeds and of food by the agro-industry. GM plant cultivation is known to increase pesticide use, and is a threat to agro-ecological systems (such as organic farming for example) because of gene contamination in the fields. But more importantly, we do not need GM plants, as we are already producing more than enough food for the EU population, and GM plants do not offer any advantages in terms of price or quality.

The draft regulations will be debated by Member States’ experts on December 9 and voted on January 27. Now is the time to let your Minister know what you think! Click on your country below - sorted according to their usual position on GMOs at the EU level - to send a tweet to your Minister(s) in charge of GMOs.

http://greens-efa-service.eu/nogmo/