Gene-edited food does not need to be labelled in supermarkets because the science is simply speeding up the natural process, the farming minister has said.
Mark Spencer told farmers that Britain needed to stay “at the forefront” of gene-edited (GE) crops, which he said would have a “huge positive impact” on food security. Asked whether such products should be labelled once they went from field trials to products on shelves, he said “we’re not going to go down that route”.
Spencer said: “You end up in a position, if you’re not careful, with food labels being bigger than the products themselves, because of all the data on calories and ingredients. The most important thing is to make sure that that is regulated and it’s safe for consumers. Actually, what we’re doing is just speeding up the process of natural breeding.”
The government introduced a precision breeding bill to parliament last May, enabling a legal change so that GE crops can be treated differently from genetically modified food, paving the way for it to be sold in shops. Unlike genetically modified food, GE food does not involve the transfer of DNA from one species to another. Instead it uses technology to edit the genes of a crop to produce health and environmental benefits, such as tomatoes with vitamin D or more drought-resistant plants.
Max Anderson at Bright Blue, a Conservative think tank, said gene-edited crops were a good thing. “But labelling gene-edited food is important. Public awareness about gene-edited crops remains low. Without transparency, the government is opening the door to a potential backlash with the risk of the public turning on this exciting new technology.”
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Genetically modified food, which is widely grown and consumed in the US, was not adopted in the UK partly because of a consumer backlash against “Frankenfoods”. Supermarkets have largely stayed silent on GE food, with none willing to confirm they will stock such products.
Speaking at the Oxford Farming Conference, Spencer faced criticism from farmers after he announced new payments, worth up to £1,000 a year, for a switch to more nature-friendly farming subsidies. The National Farmers Union said it was “too little, too late”, while the Country, Land and Business Association said ministers were “moving too slowly”.
Minette Batters, the NFU president, told The Times that Spencer’s offered a “worrying lack of content and certainty”. She said the payments of up to £1,000, for a new scheme known as the sustainable farming incentive, “was neither not here nor there”, because farmers still did not know whether the scheme would be profitable for them. “There’s still a huge lack of clarity,” she added.
The new payments are part of a post-EU shift to pay £2.4 billion of annual farming subsidies in return for social and environmental improvements, such as turning around farmland bird declines with better and more extensive hedgerows. The old “direct payment” subsidies, based largely on how much land farmers own, are being phased out by the end of 2027. New figures from the government show direct payments have fallen from £1.8 billion of the £2.4 billion total in 2020-21 to about £1.4 billion in 2022-23.
The NFU warned last month that the UK was sleepwalking into a fruit and veg crisis as rising costs put pressure on farmers.
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Batters said that message was not being heeded. “I still fear that the whole issue of food security is not being taken as seriously as it should. We’ve got nearly five million less laying hens than we had. We’ve got the lowest levels of tomato in production since records began in 1985.”
There have been egg shortages for months, poultry farmers having been hit by inflation and bird flu. Next month, some free range eggs will have to be labelled as “barn eggs” because of how long chickens have been kept inside to prevent the spread of avian influenza.
Lesley Mitchell at the think tank Forum for the Future, which produced a report for the farming conference, said: “If we do not deal with the urgent challenges that farmers face as the cost of production rises, I believe we will not just be seeing supermarket shelves empty of eggs.” She said pork and fresh produce were both at risk of disappearing from shelves without action by government and food companies.
