Secondary legislation to unlock the powers of the Precision Breeding Act is expected imminently and will do much to determine the prospects for investment in English GE crops – those where beneficial traits that could have occurred naturally are sped up, rather than GM, which involves inserting DNA to add traits.
Getting the framework right will be critical and that wasn’t lost on a Croptec panel of chair and NFU Deputy President David Exwood, Prof Nigel Halford of Rothamsted Research, Bayer Crop Science’s Mark Buckingham and BOFIN founder Tom Allen-Stevens.