Listen to our new podcast episode, where Nina Holland talks about the intense lobby battle that the biotech industry has been waging to get its new generation of genetic modification techniques excluded from European GMO regulations. 

GMO stands for genetically modified organisms. This will mean that crops or wild plants made by using this new generation of genetic modification techniques, will no longer be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling.

The underlying key word for today’s episode is deregulation, and that is a complicated word because it can sound interesting, like it can sound that it will allow people or things to, I don't know, to go about their lives more easily, not so burdened by bureaucracy. However, what deregulation here actually refers to is the scrapping of rules to protect health and the environment. It is an argument used by the industry whenever they don’t want to be supervised and their products to be, well, regulated and maybe even labelled to tell consumers how they were produced, as is the case with GMOs.