The Citizens’ Awareness and Concerns During the Transition from Genetically Modified to Genome Edited Plants in Europe About Their Use in Agriculture and Food Production

Abstract The genome edited crops and foods are commercially cultivated and marketed already at global level, rapidly expanding towards new applications and plant species, and successfully complementing the genetically modified ones. In the European Union, the genome edited plants have to follow the two-decade-old regulatory framework for genetically modified organisms. The decrease of both, number of notifications for field trials, and hectarage and countries commercially cultivating genetically modified plants, registered in the last decade in the European Union, has been closely followed by lower levels of awareness and concerns expressed by the European Union citizens about their use in farming and food production, as recorded by a long time series of Eurobarometers surveys. In contrast, in the four recent years only, the awareness about genome editing among the European Union citizens has significantly increased, reaching more than the half of the one about genetically modified products, along with the number of concerned European Union citizens about genome editing which also has doubled. The public opinion about genome edited crops and food products needs to be monitored further as it decisively influences the new regulatory framework to be proposed by the European Commission and therefore the extent to which the European consumer will benefit from the new biotechnologies.