The European Sustainable Agriculture through Genome Editing (EU-SAGE) network and its members from 132 European research institutes and associations urge the European Council, European Parliament, and the European Commission to reconsider their stance on genome editing, which is one of the tools needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In an open statement, the EU-SAGE network said that developing new crop varieties need tools that are safe, easy, and fast, and the latest addition to these tools is precision breeding or genome editing.

The use of precision breeding techniques, however, has been halted in Europe on July 25, 2018, due to the ruling of the European Court of Justice which placed all crops developed through this technique under prohibitively strict GMO regulations, even if no foreign DNA was introduced in the crops.

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