It's been a wet dream of the biotech industry since a long time.

They've always wanted to get rid of the GML rules.

You're man on the moon.

You're listening to EU Watchdog Radio.

Hi, I'm Joanna, Com's officer at Corporate Europe Observatory.

Welcome to EU Watchdog Radio, podcast we share with Counterbalance, an NGO that is not only

our friend and ally, but also our neighbor

in the building Mundo Matunga in Brussels. In this episode, I will talk to my colleague Nina

Holland about the intense lobby battle that the biotech industry has been waging to get its new

generation of genetic modification techniques excluded from the European GMO regulations.

GMO stands for genetically modified organisms and 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 labeling. The underlying keyword 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 and things to, I don't

know, go about their lives more easily, not so burdened by bureaucracy.

However, what deregulation here actually refers to is the scraping of rules to protect health

and the environment. Deregulation is an argument that is 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 it is the case with GMOs. That is what deregulation is about.

It is literally, in this case, scrapping of rules entirely

for a category of risky products, GMOs,

...