A Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) assessment finds that most government regulations of genetically engineered foods are a political solution in search of a scientific problem. Mutagenesis, for example, not only doesn't need 15 years of assessment and public comment, it is routinely certified "organic" - despite being created by chemical and radiation baths to force mutations until a beneficial one occurs. Meaning they are far less precise than modern technology like CRISPR-Cas9, GMOs, and RNAi, which governments politically allied activists all strangely call "GMOs" and proactively ban.
Genetic engineering, gene editing, and GMOs are no more interchangeable than claiming all animals are cows because cows are animals, yet anti-science activists from Greenpeace to Swiss Public Eye don't know enough science to see the distinction.
There is no safety issue in anything from mutagenesis to modern products so rules and regulations on process and production methods just lead to delays at high cost. It keeps no one safe because there is no harm. A billion people have eaten GMOs without a stomach-ache, and a trillion livestock animals in addition.
If Greenpeace wants to continue to spend millions to oppose harmless advancements like Golden Rice, let them. Government should not be in collusion with them.
Why not make gluten-free wheat? We should absolutely have cassava without cyanide poisoning and bananas with natural immunity to disease. Instead, a fish that grew slightly faster due to having a gene from a nearly identical fish a few hundred miles away, that involved no safety concern, was delayed for nearly two decades because regulations that existed before GMO insulin did treat a harmless food change like it is a new cancer drug.
If Scotland wants to stay trapped in the 19th century, that is okay, but that is no reason internationally valuable food growers should cripple themselves.
