The glimmer of a law for the genetic improvement of plants

The De Carlo bill (FdI), under discussion in the Senate, proposes to reopen outdoor trials of improved plants, never banned in theory, but always blocked in practice. A text that must be analyzed and contextualized in a country that has always been reluctant to innovations in the agricultural sector

It is said that a swallow does not make spring, but perhaps this spring could bring a new swallow. In its beak it carries a symbolic olive branch in the shape of the 488 bill presented by Senator De Carlo (FdI). If the essence of the text now under discussion in the Senate turns into law, a quarter of a century of clashes between the scientific community and the political class could find a way of dialogue. In 1998, at Alan Friedman’s, I began a debate with the then minister Rosy Bindi on the progress of genetic improvement in agriculture, which was already represented by advertising graphics as an omen of health and environmental damage. Compared to then, the De Carlo bill reverses by 1,260 degrees, or three and a half turns. The text proposes to reopen the outdoor experiments of improved plants, never prohibited in theory, but always blocked in practice since 2006 by the laws of the green-black duo Pecoraro Scanio-Alemanno. The text overturns what was legislated twenty years ago: it establishes certain times for the authorizations to experiment. The texts of the green-black duo do not yet have the technical standards to allow scientific experimentation: read silence-dissent. Bill 488, on the other hand, is a silent assent draft: it establishes a scan of the times, it does not start from the premonition of an epidemic or a cataclysm, it aims to reduce the use of avoidable agropharmaceuticals, it pushes for the fight against climate change, it exhorts adapt crops to the already changed environmental conditions, recognizes the risk of causing the country to accumulate definitive delays in national agricultural production, fears the risk that without genetic improvement we will still have to increase imports of expensive foodstuffs, sees the potential damage for national entrepreneurship .