The government authorizes GMOs (but calls them Tea)

An amendment to the Drought decree-law was approved in the Senate on Tuesday, which authorizes field trials of vegetables for agriculture obtained with the so-called “assisted evolution techniques” (Tea). I fully understand the reader’s disorientation: what are assisted evolution techniques? The term, it must be known, is the hypocritical verbal blanket that serves to hide a very important fact: for the first time in our country, politics, and farmers’ associations in their entirety, including those that dictate the agenda to politics , have decided that plants with modified genome, intended for our consumption or that of our animals, can at least be studied in the field, thus promoting the same research that for decades has been condemned and pointed to as the devil’s dung. However, precisely because of this demonization, reality had to be obfuscated in every possible way, why go and tell the public that changing the genome of an agricultural variety using modern biotechnologies to obtain improved products, after the prevailing anti-scientific narration from all promoted against GMOs, it was not practicable; and therefore a completely new narrative was invented, suitable both for obscuring reality and for portraying a clear detachment from what had been condemned up to now.

So, let’s see: first of all, the empty but suggestive term of “assisted evolution techniques”, all aimed at suggesting man’s loving attention to the natural selection process, instead of that diabolical artifice that the multinationals wanted for everyone the costs of selling ourselves (and which we have bought from abroad in disproportionate quantities, as in the case of transgenic soybeans, but hypocritically prohibited in our fields). Actually, teas consist of neither more nor less than editing the genome of the target species, to modify genes of interest and introduce interesting traits: instead of having a virus do the editing, then selecting the best genomes for us, we now control the cutting and insertion of the new genetic material ourselves, through Crispr’s “molecular scissors”. To be clear: we could recreate a hitherto prohibited GMO with Crispr, through a different technical procedure, obtaining the exact same variety, and call it the “Tea” variety instead of “GMO”. If what was approved in the Senate is fully implemented, we could plant this GMO obtained with tea in experimental fields and see how it behaves.

Do you feel slightly teased? You are right, but it doesn’t end there. Many have hastened to write that the “Teas” do not involve the insertion of DNA from different species in the recipient plant. But just as with “Teas” you can get what until recently we called GMOs, so it is true that with the transformation and selection techniques typical of what we have prohibited up to now it is possible to obtain the exact same variants that we want to call “Tea”, albeit perhaps with an extra effort. What has changed is the tool, not the goal and not even the result; in fact, in the rest of the world, starting from Europe, there are no “Teas”, which are instead called new genomic techniques. There is only one truth: a barrier has finally fallen, artificially introduced and based on the demonization of GMOs, which has completely blocked our research, only to then uselessly and shamefully increase our imports of transgenic food for our livestock supply chain (which cannot to do without food obtained from plant biotechnology) and except to use genetic transformation every day to obtain, for example, drugs or other useful products from microorganisms.

Imagine: it is as if for years they had told us that surgery is evil, only to then, once robots have been introduced in the operating room, inventing that what they can perform is something different, called with pleasant terms such as “repair of the body”. , despite the fact that it’s a mere technical improvement to do exactly the same things, as long as you’ve decided which ones. This is the unbearable hypocrisy that tarnishes the satisfaction of researchers for having been recognized after decades the possibility of doing in Italy what is done in the rest of the world: with a pure rhetorical trick, a barrier has finally been knocked down, but at the cost of the official mockery of all Italians who are a little less aware of the thing.

Could it have been done differently? Could a good decision be avoided with a hypocritical lie? Of course yes. For example, it could have been argued with more reason and less lies that decades of cultivation of GMOs have not highlighted any of the problems feared; that is, it could be said that the evidence of safety for human and animal health, as well as for the environment, had reached such a level, supported by such a mountain of data, that there are no reasonable doubts about the use of certain products (differentiating case by case, this is obvious). It could even be said that, in the end, the suggestion of certain bad teachers had by now been overcome, and that the unreasonableness of importing thousands of tons of GMOs and simultaneously demonizing them had to end. But, even more than the current government, it is certain trade associations and certain movements that would have risked being accused of having defrauded the Italians; better therefore to continue in the fruitful strategy of cheating. And so, welcome to the fields, dear Teas; always hoping that in reality the meaning is not that of “Techniques to Avoid Accepting” reality.